Ground Sea 地浪

20.3 × 27 cm
176 p
Chinese, English
Offset Printing
ISBN 979-8-9890170-4-1
First Published in 2025

Photography and Concept: Kanthy Peng
Poet: Geng Yao
Designer: Muxi Gao, Company Per Form

Press:
Collector Daily

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Kanthy Peng’s debut artist book, Ground Sea, weaves a visual narrative exploring depression, memory, and loss through 73 photographs. The title takes inspiration from an archaic West Indian term, which anthropologist and feminist Emily Martin used to capture her sensations when observing the Affective Disorder Clinical Rounds, “(Ground-sea is the name) for a swell of the ocean, which occurs in calm weather and without obvious cause, breaking on the shore in heavy roaring billows. A distant storm, out of sight, is often the cause of a ground-sea.”

In Ground Sea, Peng re-orchestrates photographs spanning over a decade and multiple projects into a new diptych-structured work. The first part, Sunset Watchers, unfolds through black-and-white portraits of three women reenacting a phantom folktale following the 1896 tsunami in Japan—images that also allude to the anxious premonition of those living with depression. Interspersed colored photographs recall Peng’s bodily memory of being bedridden due to illness. The second part, Kuāfù Chases The Sun, carries stills from two video works about Peng’s father, who retired from the People’s Liberation Army ten years after his daughter left home. In these images, his body is constantly propelled forward by the cogs of a system, breaking the stagnation of the first part, only to fall into nothingness ultimately.

The book also features two poems by poet Geng Yao. One pays tribute to a mutual friend of Yao and Peng; the other reflects on the struggle for social mobility through the lens of China’s “small-town swot” phenomenon, resonating in parallel with the book’s imagery. The design engages with the flux of the visual narrative through calibrated shifts in graphic and material density. In an attempt to reflect a concern of the artist, of highlighting the physical experience of depression over its pathology, the design treats text as image and image as matter. The book unfolds through fading, interruption, and repetition, ending with a long scene of the artist’s father running toward a vanishing point.

Peng likens the depressed body to a receptor and amplifier of signals from the future, much like the camera she holds in her hands. In the tension between stillness and motion, waiting and chasing, the book poses a question: Are those paralyzed by the impending catastrophe in need of treatment, or is it the society—numbed by its relentless pursuit of progress—that requires awakening?

Special Edition here