Seated on a gray rock against a backdrop of neglected, lifeless, and tangled bushes, a man with dark makeup smudged around his eyes, staring intensely into the camera lens.
Like most photos of this atmosphere, it didn’t use stark black and white. The photo was in color.
Paradoxically, this emphasized the desolation of the background even more.
Even with the natural colors, the background in the photo was dark enough, rough, and desolate.
Just like the image I had when I first saw him in Phantom’s underground vault, Juhan hyung in the photo, pulling the neckline of his sweater up to his chin and staring straight ahead, or rather glaring, looked like a model.
To someone like me, his poses, expressions, and the atmosphere he created with them, already seemed no different from that of a professional model.
OLD FUTURE.
The website run by Yuni noona and Juhan hyung wasn’t just a simple clothing shopping mall run casually as a hobby, as they had nonchalantly said.
It didn’t seem to be updated often due to their busy Phantom work, but in addition to the product sales category, it also featured photos they had taken themselves, photos of the two of them, and postings recording and describing moments from their travels and daily lives, and the thoughts derived from them.
Hong Kong was a city I had visited many times, so many that I couldn’t even remember the exact number.
It was also a city I had become so familiar with that I could now find my favorite shops, cafes, and pubs hidden like codes in every corner of Soho’s complex maze, without the help of Google Maps, as if it were my own neighborhood where I grew up.
Among the areas in Hong Kong, I especially liked Old Town, which encompasses NoHo, SoHo, and PoHo, facing each other along the steep uphill road leading to the tourist attraction Victoria Peak. It was a street lined with sophisticated and hip shops, and various small and large galleries with different concepts, but it was also a place where the most ordinary and everyday scenes of Hong Kong breathed.
Butcher shops in traditional markets hanging meat skewers that weren’t refrigerated, Hong Kong-style street stalls (dai pai dong) crowded with locals trying to grab a quick meal with a bowl of noodles, narrow buildings over 50 years old with bamboo supports along the exterior walls for remodeling construction.
Nevertheless, Hong Kong is always new.
Not just the kind of newness where previous stores are replaced with new ones, and the trends of the products displayed in the shop windows change.
Such changes are actually not newness, but rather a shallow trick reflecting the fickle nature and light tastes of consumers.
The disappointment of revisiting a place where I had enjoyed waffles on a previous trip, only to find a gelato shop in its place. We don’t call that newness.
Hong Kong is a city that is sensitive to the needs of residents of various nationalities and overseas tourists, but it is not a city that is only eager to cater to their tastes in order to extract dollars from their pockets.
Rather, Hong Kong makes outsiders adapt to them. It stimulates their minds with its own newness, the identity of Hong Kong itself.
Where does newness come from?
From Europe? From America? From one of the Russian federal states that people who are tired of Nordic interiors and kinfolk have discovered?
Calling that newness would be an extremely relative interpretation from the perspective of the mainstream culture of the world. Because it would have continued to exist even before the mainstream culture ‘discovered’ it.
Newness is born. It is created. It is born from within.
The colors, smells, and the languages of various countries mixed with the Cantonese dialect that the streets of Hong Kong create. Hong Kong’s own newness, which shows a different face every day based on the most international advanced sense and the most indigenous Hong Kong locality. The future of Hong Kong that already exists in today’s Hong Kong.
Although Kwon Juhan and I barely smoke a pack a year, to the point where it’s ambiguous to even call us smokers, after having a drink at a pub in Soho, we run to the convenience store to buy cigarettes and a lighter without even discussing it.
This isn’t about pretense, it’s about image.
The image that the city of Hong Kong evokes in us. A city where it would be strange if art didn’t develop. A city that doesn’t make sense.
It’s just the way we enjoy the image that the city projects. Just like some people take selfies in this city, some people do mukbangs, and some people go shopping.
Even on this trip, I saw, heard, and smelled ‘Old Future’ through Hong Kong. Despite many other shortcomings, Hong Kong was still a stimulating city in that it was alive, reacting, and reproducing.
I’m not talking about learning from the past. I’m not talking about the attitude of ‘accepting’ new things, but about the conviction and focus of ‘creating’ newness.
Although it was only early June, the temperature was already rising close to 30 degrees Celsius during the day, so the air conditioning inside the coffee shop, which was slightly past Saturday lunchtime, was running strongly enough to feel chilly.
But the goosebumps that rose on my exposed skin when I read Yuni noona’s posting to the last line were not due to the low indoor temperature.
Yuni noona and Juhan hyung, posing in the narrow alley on the steep uphill road, were comfortable as themselves, without exaggerating or hiding anything, and looked like a part of the city, not tourists.
I felt like I could understand noona’s sentence, “This isn’t about pretense, it’s about image,” not with rational interpretation, but with intuition.
Just as Bali is symbolized as the paradise of Morae and Han hyung, perhaps Hong Kong is such a city for Yuni noona.
And while reading that post, for the first time, I felt the desire to go to an unfamiliar city that I didn’t even know well. I had been listening to Morae and Han hyung’s Bali talk for years, but I couldn’t bring it into the realm of possibilities that I could experience…
Looking at the object with curiosity, and wanting to experience it directly with my own eyes and hands, not as a photo or a book. Those desires were confusing.
Because I thought that all desires to want something had naturally disappeared.
They just seemed to have dried up and withered on their own like plants that hadn’t been watered, and returned to being part of the soil, starting from a certain moment in the past.
I never tried to kill them on purpose. Rather, doing nothing was the cause of their withering.
That’s why my recent reactions to external stimuli were surprising, before they were welcome or frightening.
It was like opening my eyes, which I had kept closed all along, thinking they no longer functioned, and realizing that I could actually sense light and darkness… That kind of feeling.
I still couldn’t see the clear shapes of things, but my eyes were sensing that there was light and shadow in the world.
Light and shadow. It may seem like a small part, but for some painters, it is the beginning and end of a painting.
I want to go to Hong Kong. I want to smoke a cigarette with Yuni noona and hyung on that street in the photo. If I do that, maybe I can trace the texture of the senses and images that noona expressed in her writing.
Hong Kong, which I had no interest in, was just a city that had been a British colony for a long time in the past, and was returned to China at the end of the 20th century, and even after that, it still maintained its own language, culture, and customs that were distinct from mainland China, and was often mentioned as one of the most expensive cities in the world along with cities like Singapore and New York, came to me with a living charm, with an expression, a scent, unique habits, and a unique way of speaking.
With just noona’s sentences and a few photos attached to them.
In the very last photo of the posting, the two were standing close to each other against the backdrop of the brightly lit night streets, smoking cigarettes. It wasn’t a specially posed photo, but a photo that someone seemed to have captured a natural moment.
The two of them were looking at the same place, with their eyes wider than usual, as if they had discovered something that caught their attention. It must have been the moment when someone who had been observing them continuously captured them in the lens.
In the right corner of the photo, it was specified as photo by. Kun.
Liu Weikun.
As I officially became the ‘representative’ of the organization I belonged to, I was finally able to know his full name.
I imagine him capturing the two of them from this side of the camera lens. I could easily picture the three of them enjoying the moment and space, capturing each other in the camera on the streets of Hong Kong. People who can coexist without having to wage a war of attrition to change each other, even with the strongest personalities.
I brought the mug to my lips, recalling their unique bond, where they coexisted without being divided into superiors and subordinates, despite their different ages, environments, and positions within the organization. The coffee was cold. A light sigh escaped.
What I perceive with my vision, which I thought I had lost, is not just bright light.
Among the dazzling people, I couldn’t help but see how much I had neglected myself.
The rustling I felt that night when I hung out at the Spanish-style bar that was like a hideout wasn’t just due to my uncheerful personality.
In the meantime, I had been trying to protect myself by ‘not choosing anything’. I believed that I could stay in the present and maintain myself by constantly refusing to move on to somewhere beyond.
But doing nothing could not maintain the status quo.
Bricks, plastic cups, and erasers can maintain their appearance as they are if they do nothing. Generally, that’s the case.
But living things are not like that. If you don’t water them, if you don’t provide nutrients, if you don’t open the window and ventilate… they become impoverished. The mind, emotions, and even unique personality or talent.
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