CHILDREN OF THE TIDE
During my academic years at the sinology department of Ca’ Foscari University (in Venice, Italy) I kept bumping into detailed descriptions of massive tidal waves and references to fearless watermen from the ancient state of Wu who would tame them. At that time I simply dismissed these as oddities. Then, in 2006 during a trip from Hainan island to the Everest Base Camp in Tibet, I lucked into an enigmatic installation of about 30 wave-riders, displayed in the Bamboo Temple (Qiong Zhu Shi), a Buddhist monastery in southwest China’s Yunnan Province, 600km from the nearest coastline.
The bass-relief was dated 1880 – decades before surfing spread from Polynesia to the West. Their perfect sideways stance, the stoked grin on their faces; it was clearly a different beginning, disconnected from the
