Rockbund Museum | Wan Hai Hotel

Wan Hai Hotel: Indigenous Oceanic Resilience

To exist as Shanghai (a name which translates literally as "upper sea") is to be born of rivers and seas, to rise through the churning currents of trade and flux. The Pacific, which cradles this place, is most often seen as a site of inexhaustible resources, an ocean-wide quarry for extraction, for territorialization. Against these visions that reduce the ocean to resource or boundary, we have reimagined our ground floor as Wan Hai Hotel: a speculative hotel dedicated to the epistemology of seascapes, a space for unmooring, dismantling the borders that have framed and harnessed the seas we depend upon.