In her ongoing series Amphibian palm (2024– ), Lesley-Anne Cao places fabric books in tanks of water, where wave-driven mechanisms turn their pages. These works hinge on water’s contradictory qualities: transparent yet visible, buoyant yet heavy, life-giving yet destructive, sustaining and undoing in equal measure. Typhoons are proof of this violent contradiction. In For measuring the wind (2024), Cao embroidered onto a submerged book the names of typhoons retired from the Philippine weather bureau’s official list due to the extent of devastation they caused. Etched into fabric rather than merely written, the names are unerasable and persist like memory, returning through the very element that once carried the storms.