SULU STORIES (2005)

In her youth, I-Lann Yee heard magical stories about the Sulu Sea, which lies between her native Malaysia and The Philippines. For instance, there is a dragon that lives along the coast, which likes to play with a pearl ‘as large as a tennis ball’. Later she learned that the world’s largest pearls were found in the Sulu Sea. I-Lann Yee began to dig further and stumbled across a selection of legends full of pirates, kidnappings, shipwrecks, opium and ghosts. She reworked elements from these stories into photographs that she made of the Sulu Sea, creating a visual archive which says much about the surrounding region. Because, as I-Lann Yee says, ‘We do not feel Malaysian or Filipino. We feel Sulu.’