MonsoonFish 阔目
Independent Zine × Print Culture & Transregional Cultural StudiesIndependent Publication / Cultural Research & Print Practice
Timeframe
2025 – Ongoing
Format
Printed Zine (Bilingual Content)
Role
Founder & Project Manager
Cai Boxuan (Boosen Tsai)
Background
MonsoonFish is an independent zine project that emerged from Teochew Echo (回南天) and evolved through the author’s lived experience across Southeast Asia. While the earlier publication focused on a specific regional identity, MonsoonFish expands its scope to the broader Monsoon Belt, using climate, circulation, and movement as analytical frameworks for understanding cultural flow.
Rooted in a sustained interest in print culture, the project responds to the diminishing tactile experience of reading in the digital age. It treats printed matter not merely as a medium, but as a vessel of memory—capable of preserving texture, rhythm, and sensory traces that cannot be replicated online.
Description
The title MonsoonFish signals a conceptual shift. Rather than anchoring culture to a fixed place, the project examines how seasonal monsoon routes historically facilitated trade, migration, and cultural exchange across the Indian Ocean, the Strait of Malacca, and the South China Sea. Through these cyclical movements, cultures were continuously reassembled, producing forms of glocalisation long before the term existed.
Each issue of MonsoonFish documents, compares, and reflects on cultural practices encountered across regions—drawing connections between everyday life, historical memory, and contemporary experience. By situating culture within a dynamic, climate-driven system, the publication challenges static or essentialist understandings of identity, emphasising culture as a living, evolving process.
The zine combines essays, interviews, visual materials, and archival references, using print as a slow medium that allows ideas to sediment over time. In doing so, MonsoonFish positions independent publishing as both a research method and a form of cultural practice.
Outcomes
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Ongoing independent zine series with expanding regional scope
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Development of a transregional cultural research framework centred on the Monsoon Belt
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Integration of printmaking, writing, and visual documentation
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Established a long-term publishing platform connecting Southeast Asia, Southern China, and the wider Asian context
Keywords
Independent Publishing · Print Culture · Monsoon Studies · Cultural Mobility · Glocalisation · Transregional Research · Southeast Asia · Asian Cultural Networks
关于印刷、季风与文化的流动
或许源于个人的生活经验，我始终更偏爱印刷品所带来的感知体验。整理书房时，偶尔翻出夹在书页里的纸条，顺着字迹回到某个被遗忘的瞬间，那种可以触摸、可以闻到纸张气味的记忆，是互联网无法替代的。
这也是我始终愿意持续尝试做小志的原因。
《阔目 MonsoonFish》是前作《回南天 Teochew Echo》的延展与重生。从最初聚焦一个具体地域出发，随着我在东南亚生活经验的积累，视野自然被推向更大的亚洲尺度。这种转变并非刻意，而是一种自觉的文化观察：记录、比较、研究，并试图追溯文化之间的关联与流动路径。
相较于中文名的隐喻，英文名更直接地呈现了这种变化。“MonsoonFish”将关注点从“潮州”扩展至“季风带”。季风带来的不仅是贸易往来，更是文化的迁徙与重组。每年两次季风，从印度洋经马六甲海峡进入南海，数月后再反向而行。正是在这样的往复中，区域文化不断交流、变形，并发生所谓的“glocalization”。
将文化放入这样的动态框架中观察，会让人更清晰地意识到：文化从来不是静止的实体。它不是被封存的标本，而是持续演进的过程。真正停下来的文化，往往只存在于博物馆中；而活着的文化，始终潜藏在我们的当下。
我希望《阔目》可以持续下去。人类文明值得被相互观看、彼此欣赏。唯有在理解与欣赏中，宽容才有可能发生，仇恨与偏见才有被消解的空间。