Tilapia is a deceptively simple fish – nutritionally plain, economically powerful, culturally loaded. It sits at the intersection of subsistence, aquaculture, migration, and aspiration. This installation functions as a compression device, holding multiple lines of inquiry that emerge from the artist’s long-term preoccupation with tilapia as a cultural and material figure.

Drawing from the artist’s own upbringing, shrines and aquariums are familiar features in many middle-class Malaysian Chinese households. This work takes the form of a syncretic domestic shrine paired with a tropical ornamental aquarium – a system of belief, care, and maintenance embedded in everyday life. Centered on tilapia, a globally farmed freshwater fish often associated with affordability and resilience, the shrine gestures toward how food, value, and survival are shaped by ordinary infrastructures. These range from aquaculture and cold chains to experimental closed ecological life support systems (CELSS), in which tilapia is frequently cited as a candidate species for future space-based food production.

Using simulated aquatic life rather than living organisms, the installation stages a closed, aestheticised ecological system that mirrors both domestic aquariums and speculative models of sustenance. Here, tilapia becomes not an object of worship, but a post-religious deity of survival.