Déjà Disparu
2020—2024
Compiled in 2024
Photography (B/W), Text
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I alight from the bus with Hokkien still ringing in my ears. While I don’t understand what was said, the tenor of the conversation follows me home, where it continues to wrap me in its spirited embrace, past the construction site, across the street, and into the building lobby. I walk past a group with a stroller and dodge the centrifugal fan, still out after yesterday’s rain, ready for action should more ensue, and await the lift.
I’m sweating, causing my t-shirt, a new one with a Keith Haring ‘radiant baby’ design, to stick to me. Soon, it’ll make its way into the washer, where it’ll begin its slow, inevitable transition into shapeless, threadbare comfort. A promise of good days to come. It occurs to me while I’m waiting that we’re forever wrapped in layers. Some are tangible, such as sweat-soaked clothing or takeaway boxes of polystyrene, while others are ephemeral: languages, syntax, and time.
This layering—the constant shifting of gears our environments require—shapes our daily existence, giving it colour in both the physical and psychic sense. While we seek alignment, a semblance of shared understanding within our environments, dialling our perceptions up and down across different frequencies, we still often find ourselves caught between stations. I’m re-reading Juan Emar’s Yesterday, and his description of a world suspended between temporalities resonates. He writes:
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I continued to formulate my thoughts and memories with the usual slowness of the citizens of San Agustín de Tango yesterday, which was the same usual, slow speed as the day before yesterday, as today and tomorrow, as all the ages that have descended since Adam and all those yet to come, until the very last one dwindles away. Conversely, the spectacle we witnessed... was ruled by unheard-of speeds: not the speed of humans, but the breakneck speed of lions that are furthermore enraged, a compounded speed that surely compounded all existence, the spinning planets, moving constellations, the whole universe, except for the two of us, poor human beings stalled at the top of an elm, poor beings like so many others who roam and haunt this earth.2
It’s a feeling that I recognise in Hong Kong. Instead of an elm, I find myself stalled in my shoebox of an apartment, twenty floors up, suspended between ground, sky, speed and stillness. My own private entrepôt. As cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas writes: ‘The city is not so much a place as a space of transit... A port city that used to be located at the intersections of different spaces, Hong Kong will increasingly be at the intersections of different times or speeds.’3 The title of this series—Déjà Disparu—draws from Abbas’s phrase of the same name, referencing a condition where presence is always already lost. As he puts it: ‘...the feeling that what is new and unique about the situation is always already done, and we are left holding a handful of clichés, or a cluster of memories of what has never been.’4 In this city of overlapping presents, disappearance is a condition of arrival.
It reminds me that photographs, too, are not singular transmissions, though they may appear that way. Ariella Azoulay writes, ‘no one is the sole signatory to the event of photography.’5 A photograph is never just a picture; it’s an encounter—between photographer, subject, and viewer—and a layered one at that. Each image holds traces of intention, context, memory, and reception. And reception, perhaps most of all, is never fixed. It shifts as we shift. Like cities. Like language. Like the light that falls differently on the same hillside depending on the hour or the weather.
I began this series during the COVID-19 global pandemic. The heavy shadows felt appropriate then and became a recurring element in the work, adding another layer to an image where time itself might slow down or stretch.
Looking back now, a few years removed from the quarantining, the LeaveHomeSafe app, vaccinations, work-from-home, and travel restrictions—the stress, anxiety, and loss of life—I’m struck by how our understanding of that period continues to shift. What felt raw at the time now appears layered with new meanings, shaped by hindsight, distance, and collective memory.
It’s in these shadows I feel a kind of latency, where presence and disappearance blur—like a language overheard but not understood, in one ear and out the other—felt more than it’s seen.
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Footnotes:
- Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 26.
- Juan Emar, Yesterday (New Directions Publishing, 2022), 23—24.
- Abbas, Hong Kong, 4.
- Ibid., 25—26.
- Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Civil Imagination, A Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2024), 23.