Déjà Disparu
2020—2024
Compiled in 2024
Photography (B/W), Text
I alight from the bus with Hokkien still ringing in my ears. Something in its rhythm follows me home. I dodge the centrifugal fan and skip through the security gate, keeping the tempo alive, until the lift doors close in front of me, bringing the rhythm to a stop. I’m sweating; my t-shirt, fresh out of its Uniqlo packaging that morning, has already formed a close bond with my back.
We wrap ourselves in layers. Some cling to the skin, like the sweat-laden clothes of a Hong Kong summer; others lie deeper: language, memory, time. The writer Juan Emar imagines time not as a straight line, but as something suspended and strange, a fabric where different beings move at irreconcilable speeds. While humans plod through thought with the same sluggishness we’ve carried since Adam, lions live in the velocity of planets, their movements compounding time itself, breakneck and enraged.² I think of this as the lift pulls me upward between floors, temperatures and thoughts. The residue of the Hokkien rhythm fades from my mind as my heart rate slows, acclimatising to the cooler indoor temperature and the static hum of machinery. Emar’s sense of time is a feeling I recognise here, twenty floors above the street in a concrete shaft, suspended between velocity, stillness, ground and sky.
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—describes 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, a web of relationships among subjects, viewers, and histories, all of which shift over time, just like us.
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 seems layered with new meaning and a growing sense of distance, like a language overhead on a bus that is not understood, present yet ungraspable.
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.