Coastal Mammoth

Coastal Mammoth is an ongoing project examining the newly erected seawall in northeastern Japan, known as the Tohoku region, more than a decade after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011. It was part of a reconstruction plan to regenerate towns devastated by the disaster. The plan includes reconstructing seawalls along the affected coast, with a budget of $12 billion. Upon completion, an average of 12 meters of concrete barriers would be built along the nearly 400km coastline, altering the coastal landscape. The construction has been controversial. While experts and many coastal residents agree that newly erected barriers would minimize the damage of future tsunamis, opponents worried that it would give people a false sense of security and alter the region’s cultural identity. But the structure poses another question: Is it the trend of the future shoreline beyond Japan as we face the threat of rising sea levels? How will our relationship with the sea, physically and psychologically, be affected should these structures become integral parts of our lives? The body of work thus surveys the artificially formed shorelines and their surrounding environment to illustrate the evolving relationship of the region’s coastal ecosystem under the new static line of barriers while interrogating the effectiveness of such structure as a method of disaster prevention in the era of climate change.

Looking at Pengkuei Ben Huang’s photographs, I can’t help but think once again of the myth of Narcissus, the proud and superb youth who gazes at his own vanity reflected in the water, and how science has already played a role in dismantling this anthropological narcissism. Freud offers a concise lesson on this topic in his essay "A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis (1917)." First, he recalls Copernicus’ contribution in overturning the Ptolemaic system, turning Earth into a mere speck of dust in the universe. The first humiliation inflicted upon humanity was cosmological. This was followed by Darwin’s, or the biological one, which placed human beings back within the animal kingdom, in an evolutionary groove—far from any notion of alien supremacy. But the one that concerns us most as we view these landscape cross-sections of the wall under construction in the Tohoku region of Japan, following the devastating 2011 tsunami, is that of the consciousnessl and the fact that we are not masters in our own house, as there is an unconscious that inhabits us. Freud compares this "foreign" unconscious to the cold, icy sea of the North, threatening the shores of the ego, against which we build barriers to defend ourselves from its constant assault.

And isn't it precisely this fear of being overwhelmed by something larger than ourselves—cosmologically, biologically, and now intellectually—that is depicted in this series "Coastal Mammoth"? The photographer questions the ability of this massive infrastructural project to contain the power of the sea, the force of climate change, and the destructive might of nature. Freud also references the Dutch, who have long worked—and continue to work—at containing the dark waters of the North, evoking the experience of the Zuiderzee and the draining of its so-called “immorality,” the excess of the sea. Behind this attempt to contain "life in excess," lies a risk of isolation, paralysis, and decay—a kind of anaerobic thought. Every barrier, border, limit, and wall conceals the deeper question about confronting the threat of the unconscious knocking at our doors. How can we welcome the power of nature into our lives? How do we come to terms with the subversive surplus that inhabits our gaze and that we cannot help but contemplate? The choice is whether to give voice to the unconscious, to the sea, or to delude ourselves into thinking we can keep it out—barricading ourselves, closing doors and windows, and remaining in darkness.

These images reveal the face of a contemporary unease, of a narcissistic incontinence, and of a tangible effort to silence the universe and become hostages of ourselves.