In her youth, I-Lann Yee heard magical stories about the Sulu Sea, which lies between her native Malaysia and The Philippines. For instance, there is a dragon that lives along the coast, which likes to play with a pearl 'as large as a tennis ball'. Later she learned that the world's largest pearls were found in the Sulu Sea. I-Lann Yee began to dig further and stumbled across a selection of legends full of pirates, kidnappings, shipwrecks, opium and ghosts. She reworked elements from these stories into photographs that she made of the Sulu Sea, creating a visual archive which says much about the surrounding region. Because, as I-Lann Yee says, 'We do not feel Malaysian or Filipino. We feel Sulu.'

I-Lann Yee (Malaysia, b. 1971) is a freelance photo artist and production designer for film and television in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. SULU STORIES (2005) is part of the art project Art ConneXions, by the German Goethe Institute.