Where We Drift Until the Sea Forgets Us is a hand-drawn animation that unfolds as a fluid and continuously shifting marine landscape. Created through layers of pencil, charcoal, and pastel, the work depicts schools of fish, underwater forms, and drifting sea creatures that emerge and dissolve across the screen in rhythmic currents of movement. Images fade into one another without clear beginning or conclusion, producing the sensation of an ecosystem in perpetual motion, where bodies and environments remain inseparable from the tides that carry them.

Throughout the animation, a persistent rippling effect destabilises fixed forms, causing the oceanic space to feel both material and dreamlike. Creatures appear only temporarily before dissolving back into abstraction, suggesting an environment shaped less by stable geography than by memory, perception, and emotional drift. Accompanying the imagery is a slow, droning synthesised soundscape that moves between atmospheric ambience and tonal instability. Its elongated frequencies and occasional percussive interruptions mirror the animation’s fluctuating rhythms, evoking both calm suspension and underlying tension.

The work reflects Lee’s ongoing interest in ‘topophilia,’ a term coined in 1947 by poet W. H. Auden and popularized by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, it blends our cultural identity with our surroundings. approaching place not as a static location but as something continuously reconstructed through sensation, movement, and attachment. Here, the sea becomes a metaphorical and psychological space where histories, emotions, and urban memory dissolve into flowing visual fragments. Rather than presenting the ocean as a site of escape, the animation proposes it as a shifting terrain of uncertainty and belonging, where identity itself remains in a constant state of drift and transformation.

Directed and Animated by Florence Yuk-ki Lee
Music and Sound Designed by Sky Kung