Drawing on the myth of Hou Yi Shooting the Suns from The Classic of Mountains and Seas, Once We’re Mountain N’ Sea transforms mythological material into a contemporary meditation on the formation of consciousness, the construction of selfhood, and the longing for an originary home. The work situates the sun, moon, mountains, sea, and vegetal growth within a cyclical cosmology of emergence, dissolution, and regeneration, proposing a world in which identity is never fixed but continually in flux.
Through the symbolic conjunction of the eye and the sun, the film examines the conditions under which the subject becomes visible, fragments, and reassembles itself within a larger cosmic order. Rather than treating myth as a narrative relic, the work approaches it as a living epistemic structure, one that continues to shape embodied perception and collective imagination.
The sound component extends the original experimental language of Now It’s Mountain N’ Sea(see detail 2) into Esoteric Mountain N’ Sea(see detail 1), a text written in a deliberately constructed archaic register that echoes the narrative cadence, cosmological imagination, and compositional logic of ancient Chinese mythic literature. Drawing on the vocal cadences of shamanic chant and re-coded through contemporary sound design, the piece forms an audiovisual ritual at the intersection of mythology, embodied knowledge, and speculative sound.
