The ocean links separated lands and sustains countless forms of life. “Tawid Dagat,” a phrase in Filipino that means “to cross the sea” or “to traverse the ocean,” evokes the intertwined cultures and circulating resource systems that define our globalized era. This solo exhibition, which showcases fifteen representative works by Nicolei Buendia Gupit from 2021 to the present, initiates a critical dialogue on water and climate crises, contemporary Filipino diasporic narratives, and global systems.

Nicolei Buendia Gupit is a Filipina-American multidisciplinary artist born in Los Angeles, California, to parents who emigrated from the Philippines to the United States in the 1970s due to poverty and political unrest. Having lived between the Philippines and the US throughout her childhood, her work unpacks and interweaves the layered histories of her family’s displacement within a cross-cultural upbringing. Grounded in lived experience, her practice expands the personal to engage with the broader dynamics of migration from the Philippines. Dreams of an Acacia, Mourning the Loss of a Family Tree, and Mother Crossings are not only acts of remembrance and root-seeking but also explorations of uprootedness within the immigrant condition. In these works, abacá fiber—sourced from a native plant cultivated during Spanish colonial rule and later exported to the US as a cash crop—serves as the foundational material. Correspondingly, materials such as lottery scratcher tickets symbolize migration as a gamble, while photocopy paper futilely replicates the shadow of a homeland. Amid the search for what has been lost, these elements also express a poetic self-critique of the so-called “American Dream,” or the belief that anyone, regardless of their race or background, can achieve economic success through hard work.

Her critique also emerges in a series of works that address water and climate issues from a Global South perspective. The artist assumes the role of a social agent: In the Age of Abundant Scarcity captures fragments of polluted river and lake systems, while Typhoon Survivors, Submerged Stories Surface, and I Unravel the Seas draw on community-based storytelling around major natural disasters to expose systemic imbalances in our climate. Through water, these works trace the enduring scars of the islands and the resilient stories of lives uprooted by migration. These ongoing environmental tragedies prompt urgent questions: What is being sacrificed in the process? What, then, is truly valuable? Through the works Tubig Alat and Oro, Plata, Mata, we witness the tensions between capitalistic value, extracted labor, and the exploitation of nature. The artist’s use of gold as a visual texture playfully critiques humanity’s fixation on material wealth while probing the shifting symbolic values of water and gold.

The agency of water flows throughout Gupit’s entire exhibition. Through weaving and entangling, works like baka sakali and Weaving Tides form delicate nets that interconnect family memories, embodied labor, and cultural traditions on the verge of disappearing. These gestures serve as both a return to the origins of life and an autobiographical inquiry. In swerte, paper-and-clay casts of personal belongings serve as placeholders for the stories the artist gathered from Filipino migrants who came to Taiwan in search of work. These narratives of movement coalesce into the exhibition’s central concept, bridging the life force of water, cultural heritage, and exchanges shaped by global capitalism. In We Gather, We Remember, We Make an Offering, scattered fruits and an interrupted feast evoke fragmented landscapes, bound solely by the ocean that lies between them. Such migration and passage are not only geographical but also deeply emotional—an artist’s tender crossing through the long river of life, as she carries the hope of reuniting with loved ones beyond the sea.

(Text by Wu Nien-Cheng, Assistant Curator, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts)