Work – 李若菡 • Ruohan Li

Art

Right Before the Ebb

2024 A series of video installation

The ebb begins where the flood tide reaches its peak.

Tides alternate continuously, day after day, as the energy of water circulates through the rhythm of ebb and flow. Their movement follows forces that operate with extraordinary precision, revealing an order that exists beyond randomness.

In this series, I begin with repetition as a shared condition of both nature and human society. By combining natural phenomena with manufactured materials, I seek to reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary and to capture moments where routine becomes spectacle.

The series consists of four installations: Right Before the Ebb, Bouncing Curves, Buried, and Exit.

The recurring phenomenon of tides and the mass-produced plastic shower curtain represent two distinct ways in which humans experience water. They also embody different ecological understandings of the same substance. Yet within a highly capitalized society, both are rendered “ordinary”—or even “cheap”—as value is increasingly produced through the pursuit of rarity and novelty.

To create Right Before the Ebb, I filmed the tides repeatedly over multiple days, collecting numerous recordings of the same recurring event. The final projection captures six minutes before and after 8:16 a.m. on January 11, 2024—the moment when the year’s highest high tide was predicted to occur. The video is projected onto double layers of hand-sewn shower curtains, where an industrial material becomes a translucent surface through which the movement of the ocean is continuously reframed.