Joar Songcuya's work is shaped by his experience as a seafarer, translating memories of life and labour at sea into paintings, drawings, and sound. This exploration begins with Around the World in Ten Years. Drawn and painted on six canvas scrolls, the work charts Songcuya’s seafaring journeys in a non-linear narrative: machinery, people, ports, and natural phenomena layered against the blue of the sea and the flags of the countries. Rather than following a chronological route, the work combines places, memories, and emotions into an imagined map, showing the sea as both a physical and personal space.

Commissioned for the Busan Biennale 2026, Birdsongs departs from the companionship between the bird and the ship, looking into movement and survival, nature and industrialisation, and the invisible connections that bind them. In his field research in Busan, Songcuya documented migratory birds traveling between the Philippines and Korea, migratory fish, and invisible labor. The work tracks three layers simultaneously, sky, surface, and underwater, weaving them into an immersive landscape shaped by handwritten folk poetry and a traditional ballad sung by the artist.