I alight from the bus with Hokkien ringing in my ears—melodic, consonant-heavy, its rhythm pulsing as I dodge the centrifugal fan, still out from yesterday’s rain, slip past the security gate, past the families with strollers clustered in the lobby, to the far lift that serves even-numbered floors. The doors close just as I reach them. The rhythm stops. I’m sweating; my t-shirt, fresh out of its Uniqlo packaging that morning, sticks to my back. Layers. 

Some cling to skin, like the sweat-laden clothes of a Hong Kong summer; others lie deeper: language, memory, time. In Sans Soleil, Chris Marker describes parallel time-spheres, in which people are separated from the world around them by an invisible aquarium wall.² I think of this as the lift pulls me upward between floors and thoughts. The remnants of the Hokkien conversation evaporate as my heart rate slows, acclimatising to the lift’s cooler temperature and the hum of the machinery. Here, twenty floors above the street in a concrete shaft, I recognise that suspension, between velocity and stillness, ground and sky, one temporal mode and another. 

Ackbar Abbas describes Hong Kong as a space of transit, where something’s always slipping away even as it arrives. The title of this series—Déjà Disparu—refers to a condition in which presence is already lost, where ‘what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone,’ he writes, ‘and we are left holding a handful of clichés, or a cluster of memories of what has never been.’³ To Abbas, disappearance is a condition of arrival.

I began this series during the pandemic. The shadows that fill these images felt fitting then, flooding the frame like dark ink. What once felt raw now feels distant. But maybe that distance was always part of it—not something that came after, but something present in the moment itself, like the Hokkien on the bus: heard but not understood, close but unreachable.