Whale Fall
At the heart of this sculpture lies the concept of “鲸落万物生” (“Whale fall, all things live”)—the natural process by which a whale’s death gives rise to a vibrant, temporary ecosystem on the ocean floor. In this work, I reimagine that biological cycle as an industrial mechanism, exploring the paradox of a society that builds its symbols of safety and prosperity upon the remains of what it has consumed.
Process
In this imagined world, the economy depends on whale hunting, and the entire city rests—literally and metaphorically—on the bones of its victims. The stark white forms become both architecture and skeleton, with miniature, fragile houses perched on immense bone fragments to evoke humanity’s precarious dependence on a natural world it seeks to dominate.
At the center stands a lighthouse, a universal symbol of guidance and safety. Yet here, its light is powered by the oil of the creature beneath it, turning this beacon into a monument of moral contradiction. The work confronts the viewer with the same ethical tension found in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, where the happiness of a city depends on a hidden suffering. In contrast, this sculpture exposes its sacrifice openly—the whale’s skeleton is the visible foundation of civilization, forcing a direct reckoning with the cost of light and progress.
The piece also draws from my experiences studying oceanography during a summer program in Falmouth, Woods Hole, a coastal town once renowned for its whaling industry. It gave me a deepened understanding of the fragile interdependence between human advancement and marine ecosystems. By merging myth, ecology, and fiction, the sculpture turns the “whale fall” into a metaphor for humanity’s entangled relationship with nature’s cycle of creation and decay.