Shells
Laoshi Village is an estuarine settlement on the west coast of Hainan Island. It lies on the bank of the Zhubi River estuary, where salt water and fresh water meet. The village has 113 tamarind trees planted by its ancestors, most of them more than a century old. Its traditional livelihood has long been salt farming, drawing on the salty tides of the river. In the spring of 2025, I spent a month in the village with the salt workers and learned how to make sea salt from them.
Chatting with elderly salt workers, I learned about their salt-dependent livelihoods: how these fields once brought prosperity to a place with little arable land; how diligent workers traded sea salt for rice and chickens: one load of salt for one load of rice, or five loads when trading with the Li people. Joining their work, I watched them crack open river snail shells with stones, then use the buoyancy of the flesh in brine to test its salt concentration.
One evening at high tide, I walked along the bank of the salt field after work. The channel brimmed with seawater, slowly spilling into the salt field, first filling the outlet pond, then overflowing onto the sand. Fiddler crabs scuttled away; purslane drifted on the surface. The entire salt field seemed to sing—the tide brought it to life. The last glow of sunset lay on the mirror-like water.
After that day, I began making books from Zhubi River snail shells and paper. Each page was a small painting, no larger than a shell, painted in tamarind ink and iron solution. A shell’s size is never arbitrary: a mangrove clam may take one to five years to reach five centimeters in diameter, while a leaf oyster requires two to four years. Their growth is shaped by factors including climate, temperature, and pollution. Within the space of a small shell lies an entire life’s journey. Five centimeters is tiny for a painting, but for a mollusk, it is monumental.
There is a saying in the village: without the tamarind trees, there would be no Laoshi Village. Before the reinforced bank was built along the estuary, the river’s course shifted often, eroding the soil along its edge. Without the tamarind trees to hold the land in place, the village would not have survived. The tides of the Zhubi River brought salt water into the salt fields on which the village depended. The river, the salt, and the tamarind trees form an interwoven ecological relationship that sustains the village.
The shell books made from Zhubi River shells that carried the salty tides, and from tamarind ink I made with tamarind seeds and iron scraps, are a site where matter gathers and speaks, where these relationships manifest.
Salt workers in the salt field