Long Time No See, From Somewhere Far Away

Long Time No See, From Somewhere Far Away is a personal journey embracing the connections and disconnections that coalesce around placeless origins, seeking meaning through collaborative performances.

Long Time No See, From Somewhere Far Away

I remember a time when I was young, sitting alone in my dark bedroom hypnotized by the television screen. The screen was a portal into another world– a world filled with warm crimson light. This neon light would illuminate the dark room while casting my shadow against its walls. 

I fell in love with Hong Kong films from the 80’s and 90’s while growing up in a mostly white suburban neighborhood where I felt out of place. These moving images promised an alternate site of belonging just out of reach–like a shadow. The Cantonese dialogue would sound familiar despite my lack of comprehension. Having listened to my mom speak her native tongue while growing up, I would shift in and out of fluent understanding, of reading and not reading the subtitles. I was perhaps addicted to being on the edge of something complete. 

The scenes of this port-city took me back to when I was ten years old, visiting Hong Kong for the first time in 1996, just a year before the handover. The Hong Kong I experienced then no longer exists now even as that memory is seared in my mind. It was the first time I felt the invisible weight of being a racial minority wash away as I seamlessly blended into my environment. 

So I revisit these films over and over again, noticing and savoring those moments when my fantasy of belonging, of identifying with something both familiar and alienating, becomes possible. More than the familiar but inaccessible Cantonese, I am moved by the universally resonant meaning of light and gesture–a quick glance, a lingering touch, the seductiveness of rich color. Even without reading the subtitles, I know when two characters are falling in and out of love. 

These memories from my trip to Hong Kong and experiences of Hong Kong films inform my project Long Time No See, From Somewhere Far Away. This body of work starts off with a breakup letter, written by one of the subjects of my portraits. This letter, written in the author’s native Mandarin, first reads as if it was addressed to a specific person they have left behind during their move to the US. The letter keenly notes the simultaneously hopeful and fatal changes that will drive a wedge between the two parties as they pursue their individual dreams. At the conclusion of the letter, readers get to realize that the letter is addressed not to another person but to the author’s hometown of Beijing. 

The images in this series similarly wavers on the edge of the sublime, on both the hopeful promise and inevitable failures of sustaining one’s ideal object of love. I was invested in using light and gesture to evoke the seductive power of fantasy all the while leaving reminders of their impossible fulfillment. This interplay between beauty and loss, sentimentality and pragmatic realism, best articulates the simultaneous connection and disconnection I feel towards my own Chineseness. 

But an image is more than one individual’s vision. These images are products of collaborative world building with subjects in and out of the frame. While carrying distinct experiences, my collaborators all have complex connections to China as both a place to belong and leave behind. Collating our singular memories and experiences of connecting and disconnecting from meaningful sites of belonging, this series captures a shared language and subjectivity that transcends linguistic and cultural differences–especially the more subtle kind that exists between Asian and Asian Americans. 

I explore these themes of connection, disconnection, Chineseness, with props, gestures, symbols all under the aesthetic of Hong Kong and Chinese films that I’ve grown so attached to. For me, these aesthetics create an entry point for a viewer to inhabit that edge of possibility within frames of the impossible. Long Time No See, From Somewhere Far Away is a personal journey embracing the connections and disconnections that coalesce around placeless origins, seeking meaning through collaborative performances.