Shahzia Sikander’s “3 to 12 Nautical Miles” Turns M+’s Harborfront Façade Into a Study of Maritime Power
On the edge of Victoria Harbour, the M+ museum’s digital façade has become a luminous screen for a question that is both legal and deeply political: where does a nation’s authority end, and who decides? Through June 21, Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander (b. 1969) is presenting her animated film “3 to 12 Nautical Miles” on the building’s seafront display, using the museum’s public-facing architecture as a stage for a meditation on sovereignty, surveillance, and imperial commerce.
The work’s title refers to a historical recalibration of territorial waters. For centuries, a state’s reach was commonly understood to extend three nautical miles from shore, roughly the distance a cannonball could travel. In the modern era, that boundary expanded to 12 nautical miles, a change shaped by technological acceleration, warfare, and the globalization of trade. Sikander treats those numbers as more than measurement: they become a vocabulary for access and control in a coastal zone where national authority can be asserted, contested, and enforced.
Sikander is widely known for reimagining South Asian miniature painting in a contemporary register, drawing on Mughal and Islamic visual traditions while threading in present-day and historical references. Animation has been central to her practice since 2001, and “3 to 12 Nautical Miles” extends that commitment to painstaking, hand-built imagery. The film is constructed from drawings in ink and gouache, developed through a labor-intensive process in which each added layer is scanned, producing a cinematic tableau that retains the tactile density of the artist’s draftsmanship.
Historically, the film takes the Opium Wars as its point of departure, using the 19th-century conflicts between Western powers and China to examine the intertwined trajectories of China, South Asia, and the British East India Company (EIC). The wars set off a cascade of consequences that weakened China’s position, compelling the legalization of opium, the opening of treaty ports to Western merchants, and the cession of Hong Kong to the British Empire.
Rather than narrating these events straightforwardly, Sikander builds meaning through overlap and visual layering, linking the decline of the Qing dynasty in China, the weakening of the Mughal Empire under Akbar II, and the rise of the EIC. Poppies recur across scenes as a charged emblem of opium itself, carrying the double register of pleasure and pain associated with addiction. In one image, the flowers appear as a translucent wallpaper-like projection over a table of framed portraits, including Lin Zexu, the Qing dynasty official who campaigned against the British drug trade and drafted an appeal to Queen Victoria that was never delivered.
Elsewhere, a blue-and-white porcelain vessel, suggestive of both Chinese and Islamic ceramic traditions, holds red poppies that seem to burst outward, while a Mughal-era throne fades into the background. Queen Victoria appears wearing layered pearl necklaces, with pendants shaped like maps of India and Hong Kong. Sikander’s cartographic iconography, a recurring device in the film, frames geography as something made portable and possessable, turning extraction into ornament and conquest into a kind of refinement.
Naval power, too, becomes a visual argument. While researching at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, Sikander studied 19th-century Chinese trade paintings that depict small Chinese sampans and junks alongside imposing British vessels. In her animation, the disparity in scale becomes a metaphor for how collective action and maritime force underwrote an extractive system.
The choice of site is not incidental. M+’s façade faces the water, situating the film at the literal boundary between land and sea, and at a symbolic intersection of culture and commerce. In that setting, “3 to 12 Nautical Miles” reads as both a historical reckoning and a contemporary prompt: the shoreline is not merely a view, but a threshold where power is drawn, defended, and repeatedly redrawn.
“Shahzia Sikander: 3 to 12 Nautical Miles” is screening on the M+ Digital Façade in Hong Kong through June 21.
