Déjà Disparu
2020—2024
Compiled in 2024
Photography (B/W), Text
I alight from the bus with Hokkien still ringing in my ears. I don’t understand the words, but something in the rhythm follows me home—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, skip through the security gate, and await the lift. I’m sweating, my t-shirt’s clinging to me. It’s relatively new, but already transmorgifying into threadbare, shapeless, comfort—a promise of good days to come.
We wrap ourselves in layers—some tangible, like the sweat-soaked clothing of a Hong Kong summer; others are harder to hold, intangible, like language, time, and memory. In his novel Yesterday, Juan Emar writes of time not as a straight line, but as something suspended—layered and slow—an idea that feels increasingly familiar in a city like this. He describes time moving at ‘the same usual, slow speed as the day before yesterday... as all the ages that have descended since Adam,’ while the world around him moves at ‘the breakneck speed of lions.’² It’s a feeling I recognise in Hong Kong—caught between velocity and stillness, ground and sky.
I’ve been thinking about what Ackbar Abbas once wrote—Hong Kong not as a place, but a space of transit. Something’s always slipping away here, even as it arrives. The title of this series—Déjà Disparu—comes from his phrase for a condition where presence is already lost. ‘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 In this city of overlapping presents, disappearance is a condition of arrival.
Photographs, too, are not fixed transmissions. Ariella Azoulay reminds us that ‘no one is the sole signatory to the event of photography.’⁴ Each image is an encounter, layered with memory, context, and reception, all of which shift over time—like cities, like light, like us.
I began this series during the pandemic. The shadows that fill these images felt appropriate then, and they’ve remained—latencies where presence and disappearance blur. What once felt raw now feels refracted, layered with new meaning and a sense of distance. A photograph, like memory, is never finished.
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, 25.
- Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Civil Imagination, A Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2024), 23.