The Sea of Escape 3 Favorite 

"I collected 83 images of disappeared women from Chinese social media. I printed them out, cut them, organized them, and made them into a tarot deck called "Missing Persons Notice.'"

"This is a very heavy deck. Several times, I opened the folder to sort them, only to be overwhelmed by a splitting headache, unable to continue. Yet, it is also a very light deck, made from the cheapest recycled paper available locally, and most of the cards were soon lost to the sea breeze."

"I carried this tarot deck made from the images of 83 missing Chinese women and boarded a fishing boat. With the images and ghosts of 83 women who vanished without a trace, I set sail from the port of Espoo in northern Gulf of Finland, heading towards the Baltic Sea. The boat drifted on the deserted open sea as I shuffled the cards, cut them, flipped them, and drew them... I casually drew a card with the image of a stranger, pausing for a moment in the air, but the violent sea wind quickly swept them from my hands. One by one, I drew the cards, and one by one, they fell into the cold, unfamiliar waters. As the cards scattered, heavy snow began to fall, shrouding my small boat and the women’s cards that floated silently on the sea, gradually disappearing."

"I sat on the boat, drifting with the ghosts in the sea. To lighten the mood, as they drifted past me, I blew bubbles as hard as I could in the icy wind. Eventually, I could no longer blow, and they too drifted off to somewhere unknown. I navigated the boat to retrieve the last batch of fallen cards, scooping them up with a fishing net."

"The Baltic Sea is known as the “Sea of Escape” by marine archaeologists. During World War II, countries along the Baltic coast became battlegrounds, occupied by both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. To escape, masses of refugees attempted to cross the Baltic Sea by boat, fleeing to Sweden and Finland. Hundreds of thousands perished at the bottom of this sea during their escape."

"The cards that fell from my hands into the sea depicted women who were once the world’s number one tennis champion, female college students abducted and imprisoned by human traffickers, illiterate rural women, blurry-faced selfie girls, mothers who fled their families for unknown reasons, and women searching for them—women who continue to voice out for those who disappeared in silence. One by one, they vanished. They disappeared, and many who tried to find them were also made to disappear. The owners of these cards, whose fates are unknown—some have already sunk forever into the sea they tried to escape."

"When the cards are flipped to the back, each one shows the same face. Who will be the next to disappear? Will it be you, or me?"