“Dust is the opposite thing to Waste, or at least, the opposite principle to Waste. It is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone. Nothing can be destroyed. The fundamental lessons of physiology, of cell-theory, and of neurology were to do with this ceaseless making and unmaking, the movement and transmutation of one thing or another. Nothing goes away.”
– from Dust, Carolyn Steedman, 2002.
Sometimes we write to purge, but here writing is an attempt to invite a prolonged lingering. The following short textual vignettes are moments that have adhered to the retina of my memory and mind’s eye, that I have not been able to shake off for some reason. Dust makes shape-shifting appearances in these moments, transforming even as words were getting composed and arranged for Hakara. It then dawned on me that perhaps dust is not the reason these moments have stayed. Rather, it is the shimmering line of sight, of recognition, and understanding that ever so gently cohere the objects, people, and times together—dust might just be the particles that make them visible.
I
Standing in front of a wooden chest with flowers placed on its top, the late artist Ha Bik Chuen (1925-2009) posed for the camera. Instead of traditional Chinese attire, he wore a suit jacket, long trousers and leather shoes. His left hand clutching an English photography magazine, Ha stared into space. The photograph was taken in the 1950s, when Ha was still living in Guangdong, Mainland China, shortly before he fled to British colonial Hong Kong via Macau. Born in 1925, Ha would have been in his late twenties or early thirties when he was photographed. What surprised me when I first held the photograph in my hands was its scale. For an image that is a representation of such raw aspiration and curiosity, it is so much smaller than I anticipated. The next thing that left an impression on me was the thin film of dust and water stain on the photograph.
Six years after Ha’s passing, his archive containing various kinds of materials from photography to printed matter, pornographic magazines, ceramic objects and seeds, would be processed by Asia Art Archive. Seven years after the processing began Ha’s archive would be neatly packed up into boxes again, and taken into the custodianship of various institutions in Hong Kong. A flashback: sometimes, when we were working in the project space where we processed Ha’s archive, we would wear gloves to handle the photographs. By the end of the morning or afternoon, our gloves would also have a thin film of dust on them. We would take them off, wash our hands, take a break and make coffee together. Our breaks would sometimes extend into discussions and debates way longer than we intended.
II
I called Wei Leng Tay, a good friend and an artist working with photography in Singapore (and Hong Kong, before she moved back to Singapore a few years ago), on the phone that day (since that fateful day we shared a cab ride years ago, I don’t remember not speaking to and seeing her on the phone at least once a week). She was inside a laboratory photographing mouldy slides with a microscope. The slides are from a bygone time and place that have become less interesting than what caked on its surfaces. The microscope moved slowly and loudly, its lens focusing on a miniscule part of the slide, one tiny section at a time. Dust particles stuck to the slides, blown up completely out of proportion, looked like a forest of stones emerging out from the image. Sometimes it is not just dust that gathers and cakes on surfaces. Stories and emotions pool and congeal too; they encounter moisture, a mud pool forms.
III
Sumayya Vally, “Ingesting Architecture”.
There is a line in Sumayya’s Ingesting Architecture that goes, “‘I am breathing in my house’, he was literally breathing in his house, his street, his ground, his family.” For some years now I have had an ongoing, sometimes energetic, sometimes languishing exchange with an artist on the silverfish, how it turns what it eats—documents, paper, stories, time—into dust. Digestion is perhaps more instinctively treated as an interiorised process, a primary function of our individual bodies that follows after ingestion of food. If we were to see digestion as a collective and exteriorised process, what would that be like? A friend reminded me that cooking and sharing of meals are in fact collective exteriorised digestive processes. Another friend says digestion is a vast, precarious, planetary infrastructure. Dust from the Sahara Desert moves across oceans.
IV
When Yu Man-hon crossed the border from Hong Kong to Shenzhen twenty years ago, his mother single handedly tried to navigate the legal systems between Hong Kong and Mainland, which did not speak to each other. Her son became a speck of dust that one could no longer locate in a sprawling city across the border. The other day Cici Wu sent a cow-shaped paper lantern to ride the ferry with Yu Man-hon. Nineteen years after Yu Man-hon disappeared, black dust that aspired to water swarmed the thoroughfares of Hong Kong, receded, becoming mountains beneath what you experience as every day.
V
Elvis Ip Kin Pon has a practice of looking for odd images and compositions in newspapers, and we have shared a meandering, sometimes silent, but often visual conversation over the years about how things can be looked at, how things can be contained, perceived, repackaged (in plastic bags, in wooden vitrines, in clear holders and folders, on cellular tapes), and re-looked at. A criminal arrested while wearing an odd cartoon T-shirt, lines drawn up by authorities to keep out things that are beyond our field of vision and frames of the paper. In one of these collages, he joined the lines together, rounding up a blank space. I thought to myself, remembering the book titled Dust by Carolyn Steedman in which the author expresses that while dust may be collected and swept away,more of it—as fragments of history, stories, ancestors—travels like a cloud across vast distances.
