Viewed at a distance, it looks like a neat child's display of family snapshots or holiday postcards, a symmetrical array of small rectangular pictures, covering most of a gallery wall.
Coming closer, one sees these are paintings of drowning people, heads or bodies suspended in metallic seawater, whose original tropical blue has been darkened and flattened by the spreading oily sheen of diesel fuel from a disintegrating wooden boat.
Their faces gaze out at the viewer, calm faces that do not shriek or even accuse, but just say quietly, this is me a human being, and this is you looking at me as I am dying.
There are 353 images, mostly children and women, for it was mostly children and women who boarded the boat. They are all different, yet all similar. Like the photographs of Khmer Rouge victims at Toul Sleng, their repetition eventually overpowers the emotions, as the viewer begins to gasp for breath.
The Artist speaks hesitantly, searching for the right words to introduce us to her strange imagined world of water and death. This might be the moment of their drowning, she says quietly. Or, they might just be floating at peace, resting, still wanting to stay alive.
They could be waiting for rescuers who never came, or remembering for the last time all the joy in their lives and in those whom they loved, or saying their last prayers to God before giving up the ghost.
What a penance it must have been to paint these many paintings one after the other, what an act of love.
They took so long to die through the long cold hours of night, one by one, quietly, drifting apart and disappearing. Some of the mothers, unencumbered by safety jackets, must in desperate instinct have struggled free from the trap of the women's below-deck area, only to die later in open water.
But many of the children would have been trapped inside the broken capsised hull, bobbing like corks in their securely tied little lifevests (for the smuggler only supplied lifevests for children), crowding the shrinking air space, unable to swim down and out. The inflowing water cruelly buoyed up their little bodies, butting heads into hull planks, until finally there was no more air for them to breathe.
Strange military boats came a few hours later, searchlights played on floating bodies and feebly waving survivors, but there was no rescue till fishermen arrived