Work 01 · 2026
Tidal Fields
田海草
A playable environmental history of the northern Chinese coast, where naming, classification, labor, and ecological value become rules that can be negotiated.
Tidal Fields begins with the contradiction contained in its Chinese title: 田 refers to cultivated land, while 海草 is seagrass—a flowering plant that lives underwater. The game brings human and nonhuman inhabitants of a northern Chinese coastal landscape into the same field: local residents, whooper swans, seagrass, kelp, winter wheat, stones, and seagrass-roofed houses.
Through collecting, exchanging, naming, and measuring, players encounter different systems of knowledge and value. The game asks who is able to define a species, a resource, or a landscape—and how those definitions reshape environmental action.
The work exists both as a tabletop game and as an enlarged suspended installation. Its print-and-play edition remains open source, allowing communities to download, make, adapt, and facilitate the game locally.