After
Recognition

認出之後

Chinatown, London
2022

Chinatown, London

2022
A girl looks toward the camera between passing figures, a yellow doorway and a blurred floral shirt.
01

A place can become legible before it is encountered. Chinatown arrives through an image already held in the mind: a vocabulary of colour, ornament and cultural signs. Recognition offers a point of entry, but also establishes the terms on which a place is seen. What fits the image becomes conspicuous; what exceeds it can remain in plain sight, scarcely perceived.1

A person with a green bicycle approaches through a crowded street beneath red lanterns.
02
Strings of red lanterns cross a narrow opening between brick walls, pipes and scaffolding.
03
A cleaning vehicle, passing figures and construction equipment occupy the street beneath lanterns.
04

For a diasporic place, visibility holds an unresolved tension. The forms through which a culture makes itself present can also become the forms through which it is confined.2 Familiarity gathers different lives into an apparently coherent whole. Yet that coherence depends on continuous acts of work, exchange and occupation, each with purposes that exceed the identity of the place. Display belongs to this life as fully as the labour that sustains it. Neither can contain the other.

Colourful packaged snacks form a dense grid behind glass.
05
A figure in an orange striped shirt and a magenta apron reaches toward a goods-lift control beside reflective doors.
06
A man carries a white sack beside a stack of cardboard boxes.
07
People sit and lean on red street cabinets beside a stone building.
08
An anatomical and acupuncture model covered by translucent plastic in a shop window.
09

These photographs attend to the friction between a place and its recognisable image. Bodies interrupt the view; surfaces divide and return it. Repeated colours acquire different meanings through contact, while objects assume forms that their names and functions cannot entirely describe.3 Attention moves between cultural recognition and material presence, without settling into either. The camera shares in this uncertainty: every frame draws a boundary, gathering some relations and leaving others beyond sight.2

Five people sit outside a cake shop behind a red street bin.
10
A red hinged bollard lies horizontally against grey paving.
11

To recognise a place is to bring it within an existing order of knowledge. To remain with it is to encounter the limits of that order. After recognition, the familiar persists, but no longer holds everything together. A place continues through lives and uses for which its image has made insufficient room.

A golden dragon hangs head-down beside a fire engine.
12

References

  1. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art, as Device”, translated by Alexandra Berlina, Poetics Today 36:3 (2015), pp. 161–163.
  2. Erika Balsom, “‘There Is No Such Thing as Documentary’: An Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha”, Frieze, 1 November 2018.
  3. Gabriel Orozco, “On Photography”, Art21: Extended Play, 19 November 2008.