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. 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, ready for action should more ensue, and await the lift. I’m sweating, my t-shirt clinging to me. It’s new now, but already on its way to becoming soft, 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 harder to hold, like language, time, or memory. I’m reading Juan Emar’s Yesterday, and his vision of a world suspended between temporalities feels uncannily familiar. He writes of 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.
As cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas puts it, ‘The city is not so much a place as a space of transit.’³ The title of this series—Déjà Disparu—borrows from his phrase describing 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.’⁴ 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.’⁵ 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 dominate 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.
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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.
- Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Civil Imagination, A Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2024), 23.