In May 2022, I left Cornwall for Gapado, a small island in the far south of Korea, to undertake the ‘Gapado AiR’, artist residency. Before my long journey, I debated which book to bring for the three days it would take to arrive. J. G. Ballard's "Drowned World" was an option, but due to weight constraints, I reluctantly left it behind—a decision I later regretted. In my preparation for the Gapado residency, I focused on three lines of inquiry related to artists Nancy Holt, Paul Nash, and the novelist J. G. Ballard. I carried photocopied works of Nash and Holt in my sketchbook, but Ballard's The Drowned World had to reside in my memory. In Ballard’s novel, garbage becomes something more than just garbage. Ballard describes it with a kind of elegance; waste stuff is both awe-inspiring and spectral. The notion that rubbish and other wasted matter can be beautiful is not uncommon. In art and photography terms, it’s a well-trodden path. What is particularly interesting to me is how Ballard was perhaps one of the first to imagine marine pollution. In one of his other novels, The Drought, he describes how the drought was caused by the suffocation of the ocean surface with a film of “saturated long-chain polymers.". During our present time of existential apprehension, in the context of the global pandemic and the all-encompassing environmental predicament, I find it almost reassuring that in his work I’m able to feel a sense of reassurance. That is, if it is possible to imagine these worlds, it’s also possible to imagine a world differently. With Drowned World in my mind, I found myself wandering as a Flâneur around the port of Moseulpo on the main island of Jeju. I was here due to a predicted typhoon. It meant that I was evacuated from Gapado to Moseulpo, the nearest place of safety. It is a short twenty-minute ferry ride from Gapado. The ferry delivers thousands of tourists to Gapado through the spring and summer months. While onboard the ferry, I noticed above one of the information cabins and a sign that read ‘Mysterious Clean Island’. What did this mean? My thoughts drifted back to Drowned World, the book I didn’t pack. I felt like Dr. Robert Kerans. I said to myself, There’s a clean island; where might that be? Surely, there is no such place left on earth? These photographs are observations of a place that is both familiar and unfamiliar to me. Moseulpo is a fishing port where all manner of strange pipes lie, which pump and circulate seawater from the ocean to keep fish, squid, and other sea creatures alive. They live a prisoner's life, waiting to be eaten. Everything seems to be bubbling and frothing. The colour blue is present everywhere. There are fragments of furniture, plastic wash tubs, matted cleaning cloths, and rusty pipes. Whirlpools of water are illuminated at night. A strange sense of vented worlds and smells waft back and forth carried on the sea breeze; somehow everything seems alive and squirming. There seemed to be some clear visual similarities, mirroring the fishing ports in Cornwall, where I live. However, this place seemed to distort and unsettle my perspective. Perhaps what I’m trying to explain is a deep sense of what Foucault describes in the theory of heterotopia. Harbours and ports are commonplace; they are gates between the land and the ocean; they are in-between. Like a beating heart, they are fixed to the rhythm of the tide; they seem alive and dead at the same time. It feels like a mirror, reflecting my life in Cornwall while distorting, inverting, and unsettling my perspectives. There are no aestheticized nautical relics and tourist souvenirs for sale here; just the squid staring back at me. I wonder what they are thinking. Andy Hughes December 2023