• Inundation was a 2020 art exhibition that featured 9 artists at the University of Hawaiʻi Manoa Art Gallery in Honolulu. The exhibition focused on climate justice issues in the Pacific Islands of Hawaiʻi, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, The Kingdom of Tonga, Tuvalu, Samoa, the Philippines, Okinawa (Japan), and Singapore (map below).

• The exhibit’s curator, Jaimey Faris, stated that the goal of the exhibit was to create discussions about climate change through the lens of climate justice and culture, as well as bringing regional artists from different corners of the Pacific into dialogue with each other about the similar challenges their homelands faced and their possible solutions.

How is this related to climate?

• Mary Babcock, an artist and professor at the University of Hawai’i, contributed a piece titled Lotic Sea (images below). Babcock created the piece by cutting small pieces of wax paper, fusing them together with an iron, stitching lines into it, depositing salt at the bottom of the sheet, and then backlighting it against a reflective blue room. Lotic Sea contains imagery relating to the melting of polar ice caps, as well as the economic and national borders dividing Pacific island nations.
  • Lotic is a term that means rapidly moving fresh water. In the context of the installation, the use of this term refers to the release of fresh water into oceans by melting polar ice caps, which is the main cause of present-day rise in sea level. The salt collecting on the bottom of the installation is also used to illustrate ice caps.
  • The lines stitched into the wax paper represent the Exclusive Economic Zones, or EEZ’s, of different Pacific islands. These economic zones mark where exactly nations can claim and extract resources, which can have significant impacts on their economies. Since there aren’t many geographic features to clearly mark along the sea floor where the territory of one nation begins and another ends, EEZ borders are placed 200 miles away from  their respective island’s coastline. When EEZ’s were first established at the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1982, there were no provisions for how the borders of EEZ’s might change as a result of sea level rise. Many Pacific nations like Kiribati (map above) are considering large-scale projects such as creating artificial islands – and funding them with the sale of deep-sea resources – to maintain control of their EEZ’s and to cope with sea level rise. Larger nations including the U.S., Australia, and China have also started funding climate mitigation projects like building seawalls in an effort to enable further control over resource extraction in the Micronesian and Polynesian regions.

• Kaili Chun is an award-winning Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) artist who created Hū Mai, Ala Mai, a series of ink-jet digital collages on archival paper depicting the progression of future sea level rise in specific locations on Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi: Marine Corps Base in Kāneʻohe Bay, the Honolulu Airport, and Waikiki beach (images below).
  • The locations portrayed in this piece are significant because of their ties to tourism and militarism in Hawaiʻi, and the associated land appropriation and reclamation. Both of these industries have contributed to environmental degradation in the region, as well as climate change as a whole. Chun’s work highlights the ways changing economic and cultural relationships to the environment can affect how people respond to the changing climate.
  • The name of this piece is approximately translated into English as “Burst Out, Wake Up”, urging the viewer to be more aware of the oceans and the life within them. Watersheds, particularly in Waikiki, were dynamic tidal zones and sites of abundance for Native Hawaiians. Land reclamation projects were pushed by land developers to create a “tropical tourist paradise”, disrupting watershed ecosystems. In Hū Mai, Ala Mai, Chun imagines what might happen if the watersheds were reconnected and the fish returned, picturing a return to abundance and land stewardship, as well as a coastline that’s more permeable to changes in sea level.

• Siblings Martha Atienza and Jake Atienza are Filipino artists who together created Tidal, a two-channel video installation (image below) showing the coasts of Bantayan Island, a small island near Cebu, Philippines, and Tongatapu, the main island in the Kingdom of Tonga, in the western Pacific Ocean (map above). Even though the two locations have different histories, they face the same issues of sea level rise and global warming. The videos show the rising sea and describe how the governments of the two locations are working towards adapting to sea level rise.
  • In 2015, a study on the increasing risk of intense natural disasters ranked Tonga and the Philippines as the second and third countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change  like intense storms and sea level rise, but also based on their governments’ inability to deal with disasters. Both nations have struggled with persistent coastal flooding and protecting citizens who live in smaller, low-lying islands.
  • Tidal also draws connections between extractive practices, such as mining, and coastal vulnerability. In Tonga, the building of limestone barriers around the coast was proposed as a way to mitigate erosion, but the environmental and human impacts of mining, especially pollution of nearby habitats and contamination of water, ultimately lead to the proposal being rejected. On a larger scale, extractive industries have been major sources of fossil fuel emissions, and have also seen sea level rise in island nations like Tonga as an opportunity for profit. Mining companies offer money for improving infrastructure and protection from sea level rise while extending their spheres of influence in areas with rare mineral resources.
  • The Philippines (map above) is in a somewhat different situation due to its size and industrialization: its leaders lean into the UN’s narrative of climate vulnerability and justice while also continuing to invest in coal firing plants. This attitude of “business as usual” is also reflected in the continued investment in tourism on Bantayan Island in the Philippines. The tourist industry has contributed to coastal loss in Bantayan Island in several ways. Greenhouse gas emissions from plane travel contribute towards global warming and sea level rise due to melting of polar ice caps, and building of port structures (used for both tourism and commercial transportation) advance soil erosion.

• James Jack is an artist and assistant professor of art practice at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. He contributed three pieces to the exhibition (images below): Sea Birth Three (a 15 minute digital video), Spirits of Oura (an ink painting), and Home for Pidama (a piece of aged driftwood). Together, these pieces explore the way Indigenous Okinawan knowledge and beliefs help communities face threats to their environments.
  • Spirits of Oura depicts Henoko-Ōura Bay in Okinawa, Japan, where a new U.S. Marine Corps base is being built. There have been many protests over the construction of this base since the plans for its construction were announced in 2005 due to the history of toxic substances left behind on former military bases. Additionally, the base is being built on top of a coral reef and the habitat for an endangered marine mammal species called the dugong. The people of Okinawa were able to delay the building of this base through protests and legal action, but the Japanese Supreme Court ruled that the base should be built anyway. 
    • Historically, the prominent U.S. military presence on Okinawa is due to the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security the U.S. signed with Japan after World War II, which obliges the U.S. to defend Japan and maintain security in the Asia-Pacific region. However, the construction of military bases has proven to be detrimental to the environment and people of Okinawa: some bases were built on residential land that was essentially stolen from its owners, and land reclamation processes have damaged the coral reef ecosystems and fisheries that local communities and endangered species depended on.

• Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner is a performance artist, poet, and climate change activist from the Republic of the Marshall Islands (map above). Along with Joy Enomoto (artist, scholar, and activist from Hawaiʻi), they created Sounding, an installation consisting of woven baskets (images below), a sounding line, a drawing of a humpback whale, and an audio recording of Jetn̄il-Kijiner reciting a poem (transcription below). This installation explores how weaving, sound, and water share refracting patterns of bending or changing direction, ultimately with the goal of portraying responses to environmental destruction, colonialism, and militarism in Hawai’i and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
  • The baskets, or banonoors, are used to give gifts in the Marshall Islands. By utilizing the woven baskets, Jetn̄il-Kijiner is interrogating what the people of Micronesia and the USA are offering to each other, bringing to mind the history of U.S. nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. Additionally, the hanging baskets serve as a visual representation of the weaving together of generations and voices, particularly in the Pacific, in order to create climate solutions (also alluded to in Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poem below).

• The sounding line and illustration of a humpback whale (image below) nod to the development of hydrography (the science of measuring and describing the physical features of bodies of water) in the Pacific, and its links to colonization, militarization, and industrialization in the region. Sounding lines were used to measure shallow bays for the purpose of improving navigation to ports, laying transcontinental communication cables, and surveying nuclear test sites. These histories of military and imperial powers using sound as a tool connect to present day noise pollution (which is harmful to marine animals that use echolocation, like whales) from commercial shipping boats and the use of seismic air guns in deep-sea oil exploration, which ultimately connect to climate change through the extraction and use of fossil fuels. 

• Charles Lim is an artist from Singapore (map above) and a former Olympic sailor who contributed three pieces from his series SEA STATES (images below). Each chapter of the SEA STATES corresponds to the meteorological measurements of sea conditions, with 9 being stormy. SEA STATE 9: Proclamation focuses on Singapore’s history of land reclamation through political and environmental lenses.
  • The subtitle of these pieces, Proclamation, references the Foreshores Act of 1872, a law from Singapore’s British colonial era that allows any newly made land to become new national territory. This act fostered urbanization and made land reclamation an accepted solution to overcrowding and sea level rise. However, land reclamation creates another set of problems, including urban heat islands and a higher carbon footprint. Even more technological solutions have been proposed to mitigate these issues, but the human impact of urbanization on Singaporeans, as well as Singapore’s neighbors Thailand and Indonesia, hasn’t been fully considered.

• Angela Tiatia is a Samoan and Australian artist from New Zealand. She contributed two video performances to the exhibition, Holding On and Lick, which explore relationships between people and the ocean, in the contexts of climate change and collaboration. 
  • In Holding On, Tiatia rests on a concrete slab as the tide slowly rises around her, exerting more effort to stay centered on the slab (image below). The performance is inspired by the effects of climate change on Tuvalu (map above), as well as Tuvaluans’ responses to climate change. 
  • Tuvalu is on average about 4.5 meters (14.8 feet) above sea level, which makes it extremely vulnerable to sea level rise and coastal erosion. According to the sixth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report in 2021, the sea level would, at minimum (if carbon emissions were cut severely), rise 30 centimeters (11.8 inches) by 2100. If carbon emissions rose, the sea level could rise by 1 to 1.5 meters (3.3 to 4.9 feet). The effects of even a small sea level rise would be devastating on low-lying islands and coastal areas around the world.
  • Part of Tiatia’s intention in making Holding On was to show climate change on a more personal and intimate level. As a result, the process of making Holding On involved interviewing many islanders about how they would respond to climate change: some said they wanted more international representation and lower carbon emissions, while others held the belief that God would intervene.

• • In Lick, Tiatia stands in place underwater as waves roll past her (image below), before letting go of the ocean floor and getting swept out of frame. In this performance, she challenges the popular environmentalist framing of Pacific Islanders as “drowning”, instead centering her strength, control, and collaboration with nature. Tiatia’s traditional tattoos, or malu, which are pictured throughout the performance, symbolize the role of women from Samoa as protectors of relationships between family, community, and environment. The performance as a whole highlights the strength and ability of Pacific Islanders to work with the environment and confront climate change.

References and additional resources

• “Inundation”. University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Art Gallery, 2020. https://www.inundation.org/
• Inundation. University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Art Gallery, 2020. https://indd.adobe.com/view/8578fc4a-75a0-426b-96fa-0c2f3bc0b845
• “INUNDATION: ART AND CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE PACIFIC”. University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Department of Art and History. https://hawaii.edu/art/inundation/
• “On Inundation: Art and Climate Change in the Pacific”. Ecoartspace. 2020. https://www.ecoartspace.org/Blog/8770568
• “List of the Islands in the Pacific Ocean”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_in_the_Pacific_Ocean
• Jetn̄il-Kijiner, K. “Islands dropped from a basket”. Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner. 2017. https://www.kathyjetnilkijiner.com/islands-dropped-from-a-basket/
• Ezrin, R. “Rising Tides: INUNDATION Examines Climate Change in the Pacific”. Artshelp. 2020.  https://www.artshelp.com/rising-tides-inundation-examines-climate-change-in-the-pacific/
• “Relocation of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma”. Wikipedia. 2019.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relocation_of_Marine_Corps_Air_Station_Futenma
• Johnston, B.R. and Takala, B. “Environmental Disaster and Resilience: The Marshall Islands Experience Continues to Unfold”. Cultural Survival. 2016. https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/environmental-disaster-and-resilience-marshall-islands-0
• Tiezzi, S. “How the US Military Wound up ‘Poisoning the Pacific’”. The Diplomat. 2020. https://thediplomat.com/2020/11/how-the-us-military-wound-up-poisoning-the-pacific/
• Kennedy, S. “The Environmental Impact of Military Experiments in Hawai’i”. The Register Forum. 2022. https://registerforum.org/15919/news/the-environmental-impact-of-military-experiments-in-hawaii/
• Marcoux, S. “Trust Issues: Militarization, Destruction, and the Search for a Remedy in the Marshall Islands”. Columbia Human Rights Law Review. 2021.  https://hrlr.law.columbia.edu/hrlr-online/trust-issues-militarization-destruction-and-the-search-for-a-remedy-in-the-marshall-islands/
• Oshiro, A. “From “footprint” to relationships: Impacts of US military base on Okinawa”. Sociology Compass. 2023. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13099

How to cite this page

Inundation: Art and Climate Change in the Pacific (2020). (2024, June 10). Climate in Global Cultures and Histories: Promoting Climate Literacy Across Disciplines. Retrieved Month Date, Year, from https://www.science.smith.edu/climatelit/inundation-art-and-climate-change-in-the-pacific-2020/.