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2026 Zheng Mahler, Seagrass Krachang, two-channel video, two batik banners, stainless steel and pvc seagrass protection pens, dimensions variable

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October 2024 witnessed the migration of a number of dugongs seeking refuge in Phuket’s shores, displaced from Trang Province where seagrass meadows, which they depend on for food, are rapidly disappearing. This has necessitated new negotiations between humans and dugongs, with dugongs struggling amidst the danger and destruction humans often bring. At the same time, seagrass beds are struggling to keep up with hungry dugongs and changing marine environments due to warming temperatures and tourism-induced pollution in the waters of Phuket. Globally, forests of seagrass meadows are quietly disappearing from ocean floors and are presenting an important interface in understanding and measuring the dramatic and serious impacts of a radically warming climate on marine ecosystems. Seagrass offers not only essential food sources for many marine life, including dugongs who solely rely on it, but also security and safe breeding grounds for many others, including various fish and shrimp that are often fished by coastal communities. Additionally, while seagrass inhabits only 0.1% of the sea floor, it is still responsible for 12% for the organic carbon buried in the ocean which helps reduce greenhouse gases.

Seagrass Kra Chang presents a collaborative multimedia works by Zheng Mahler around the presence and importance of seagrass in Phuket’s marine ecosystems and how a rethinking of our service economies can integrate environmental literacy with the care and restorative cultivation of marine ecosystems. In collaboration with resident marine conservationists, the Marine Biological Centre of Phuket, local citizen scientists and batik artisans, the works explore the challenges and difficulties in protecting and cultivating seagrass for Phuket’s coastal habitats, the glorious sensorial experiences of multiple species living with seagrass and the ways ecological knowledge is carried, shared and celebrated. Taking its cue from Phuket’s well known ‘floating restaurants’ or kra chang, a protection pen desgined by the artists for safeguarding growing seagrass beds on Phuket’s shores is presented in the exhibition space, suspended from the ceiling. A series of these protection pens commissioned and designed by the artists in collaboration with the Marine Biological Centre will be installed at selected sites around Rawai on the Southern coast of Phuket with seagrass in need of preservation, becoming a kind of functional, underwater public sculpture for the islands non-human inhabitants.

Integrated into the seagrass protection pen installation will be a two-channel video which combines animations of sea grass, drone footage captured by local citizen scientists and interviews with and conservationists who monitor the seagrass and dugongs populations, alongside animations representing the role of dugongs in local traditions and cosmology. This video installation will be accompanied by the sounds of marine life devouring the seagrass recorded by the the staff at the Marine Biological Centre, as well as various narrative fragments telling the story of the dugongs and seagrass.

The installation also includes a series of batik murals which flow amidst the pens and visualise elements of Phuket’s seagrass ecosystems, dugong folklore, biological/anatomical information on selected marine life and aspects of local contemporary conservation activities, like the ‘kra chang-like’ seagrass protection pens and drone surveying activities. In a place like Phuket, well known for and influenced by its large tourism and hotel economies, this seagrass bed work can help to rethink what cultures of ‘service’ and ‘wellbeing’ mean, and our notions of service and consumption in which human acts of service and (over)consumption continuously contribute to severe environmental degradation.

A final, central component of the work will allow visitors to join boat trips to Koh Bon island, where Kasira Khoo-Aroon is engaged in a 15 year project to turn the area into a marine reserve and restore its local ecology and regenerate the sea grass beds, coral reefs to make the habitat suitable for various birds, bats and sea life. On the boat trip, audiences will pass by the sea grass pens installed by the artists before participating in education programs around the local ecology and help in the ongoing cleanup of the island.

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