The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea: George and the Swimming Pool

Through an autobiographical lens, the film unfolds as Lee recalls her first middle school figure-drawing class in the 1990s, when her art teacher presented a real human skull from the school’s storeroom. Unearthed alongside two Japanese military swords during renovations in the 1980s, the skull reveals a history of erasure dating back to the Japanese Occupation and alludes to the Nanshitou Incident.  

The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea explores the trauma of displacement under the shadow of the Second World War, focusing on Hong Kong, mainland China, and Japan. The project centers on the little-known atrocity that occurred in a southern suburb of Guangzhou, China. Between 1942 and 1945, during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, thousands of Hong Kong residents were deported by occupying forces under the guise of a “Repatriation Policy.” Many were sent and detained at Guangzhou’s Nanshitou Refugee Camp, a site that Lee’s research associates with forced labor and human bacteriological experimentation.  The project sheds light on marginalized voices absent from mainstream history, tracing states of fear, survival, and fragile resilience. The refugee camp emerges as both a site of physical confinement and biopolitical control—make live and let die.  Through archival research, fieldwork, interviews, and artistic practice, the project re-examines human endurance and collective struggle under extreme conditions.