Mediation
Circa 2016—2025
Compiled in 2025
Photography (Colour), Text
What holds together, holding on. (001)
To wear emptiness proudly, and fullness quietly. (002)
To wear emptiness proudly, and fullness quietly. (002)
Spill. (005)
We stack ourselves into Tetris blocks along the side of roads, a jumbled mishmash of humanity. My ceiling’s your floor. Between us are thin walls—physical and psychic—scratched by use and marked by the week’s grime. We share communal rubbish bins, lifts, maintenance notices, and advisories reminding us not to let our dogs relieve themselves in the lifts or throw rubbish from our windows, lest it affect others’ enjoyment of the amenities or cause harm to those below.
I’ve been in Hong Kong for almost ten years now. That thought hits as I glance up at a billboard on Bristol Avenue. A woman, mid-forkful of spaghetti, beams down and in large script proclaims:
Live Italian. Live with passion!
Her charisma is all carbs and confidence. Being half Neapolitan, I feel mildly judged. I clock the message and make a quiet deal with myself to step outside my comfort zone more often.
People describe Italy as an open-air museum, un museo all’aperto. But doesn’t every place, in its own way, archive itself? Some preserve marble ruins. Others wrap themselves in layers of red, white, and blue canvas, with flyers pasted to shuttered shopfronts; palimpsests of the everyday.
In Hong Kong, I’ve learned to see in this register, to tune into the frequencies beneath the surface noise, to feel the texture of what’s vanishing, even as it forms.
Joanna Macy, speaking of Rilke, said we must ‘teach ourselves how to see beauty. How to treasure it. How to celebrate it. How, if it must disappear—if there’s dying—how to be grateful.’1
Maybe that’s the invitation: not to hold on, but to look again. To live with the grain of disappearance. To find beauty not in what lasts, but in what flickers, what is glimpsed, then gone.
Letters leaving, fingers searching. (012)
Velvet dreams. (013)
Wild patterns carry belongings,
convenient light marks time. (018)
convenient light marks time. (018)
Hunger, gathered. (022)
Labour’s armour hangs defenseless. (026)
A river that never runs. (030)
Improvising under a striped sky.
(31, 32)
(31, 32)
Footnote:
- Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, Joanna Macy, In Memoriam — Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us, in conversation with Krista Tippett, On Being with Krista Tippett, Apple Podcasts audio, July 22, 2025, https://podcasts.apple.com/hk/podcast/on-being-with-krista-tippett/id150892556?i=1000718497545.