Where We Drift Until the Sea Forgets Us is an animation installation that unfolds as an altered fairytale. Drawing upon Hong Kong’s marine history, cultural and ecological memory, Lee draws on the archetype of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, telling a story of drift from the perspective of fish, through a non-linear, fragmented, and open-ended narrative.

Digitally rendered using hand-drawn materials and textures, schools of fish and underwater forms continuously emerge, transform, and dissolve, forming a fluid marine landscape where personal histories, collective memory, and emotional experience intersect. A half-human, half-divine piper guides the fish away from a place once familiar but no longer able to hold them. They drift with the sound, slowly receding from the city, like memory withdrawing from the body.

The moving image expands into physical space through a hand-woven fishing net developed in collaboration with Hong Kong fishermen. Carrying a material trace of local marine labour, the net forms a shifting threshold between play, extraction, departure, and entrapment. The animation installation forms an emotional landscape structured as an altered fairytale, where memories, histories, migration, and emotions drift, resurface, and transform.

Lee built a database of Hong Kong’s ecology, geography, climate, oral histories, folklore, and local tales, using AI to trace connections across these materials. The research was developed with Hong Kong writer Jess Lau into a poetic, open-ended script, which Lee interpreted through hand-drawn animation. Expanding Lee’s exploration of topophilia, the work approaches place as something continuously reconstructed through sensation, movement, and attachment.