Alchemy is a contemplative two-channel video installation, taking champion free diver Mu Tou as it’s central subject. Filmed on Panglao Island, Philippines, the work unfolds through a sequence of still, observational shots. Presented across split screens, it uses mostly static camera angles to record quiet, everyday moments—landscapes, ocean views, boats in harbour, animals resting, and people going about their daily routines. These scenes are often captured from a distance, producing a detached, almost voyeuristic tone, as if the viewer were a silent observer witnessing time pass.

The video’s rhythm is slow and deliberate. Sound plays a crucial role; ambient recordings of dogs barking, distant conversations, the hum of weather and water, and the faint beat of a drum create a subtle, hypnotic sonic atmosphere taken directly from the footage. Occasionally, the editing introduces closer crops of Mu Tou preparing in front of a mirror, offering a sudden intimacy and sense of agency within the broader context of passive observation. These moments suggest ritual and preparation, both physically and psychologically, giving the subject, previously part of a background, a story and purpose not immediately revealed.

As the work progresses, the camera eventually enters the water with Mu Tou, off the coast of Panglao Island, shifting our gaze from observer to participant. By sharing the sense of physical navigation of the deep water and the immense fortitude required for what is about to take place, our perspective changes entirely, and what once felt like loosely connected fragments begin to take on narrative weight. The appearance of this protagonist invites viewers to retroactively piece together meaning, continuity, and consequence from earlier scenes.

Alchemy becomes more than a document of an environment or an activity; it forms a kind of psychogeography, where we witness the diver’s harmonious relationship to the sea. They not only reach new physical limits, but an altered state of being and in the deep, hypnotic sequences of the dive, they become fluid, centred, and transcendent. Alchemy invites viewers beyond the spectacle of endurance to ask how immersion in elemental extremes reshapes a sense of identity, control, and consciousness.