Cultivating the Sea documents the offshore lives of fishermen along the coast of Shandong, China, where labor is inseparable from rhythm, endurance, and inherited knowledge. The series centers on a world shaped by departure and return, by physical exposure to wind, salt, darkness, and uncertainty, and by a sustained dependence on the sea as the ground of survival. Fishing appears as a complete structure of life, organizing time, shaping the body, transmitting memory across generations, and defining one’s relation to family, community, and fate. Cultivating the Sea presents the sea not simply as a source of livelihood, but as a space in which human fragility, discipline, and resilience are continuously tested and renewed, carrying within it a deeper reflection on subsistence, masculinity, inheritance, and the long continuity of coastal life.