Here and Here Again

On the evening of Thursday, 26 November 2025, I was attending an event in Hong Kong’s Central district when 29 kilometres away, a fire began to burn in an apartment complex in Tai Po. Obstructed by construction scaffolding, the residents of that building became trapped inside their own homes, most of them unreachable by firefighters. Over the next 43 hours, the entire city watched as columns of smoke streamed from the windows of Wang Fuk Court towers, the rising death toll transmitted to us hourly through the screens of our phones.

Twenty-nine kilometres—was that far, or was it close? In other cities, residents of those buildings would be categorised as my neighbours, yet here a body of water separated us, echoing a distance complicated by feelings of inaction and intense surveillance. As I watched the news, I recalled moments of similar displacement from years past, my eyes fixed on a scene while my body continued its mindless rotations of work and chores.

This strange yet familiar disembodiment contextualised the theme of M+’s film programme on 6 December, ‘Avant-Garde Now: Here from Afar,’ a phrase that calls to mind the slogans of diaspora activists, or consolations spoken between loved ones to ameliorate painful separations. Yet as I watched the films and spoke with the presenting artists, I was struck by the ambiguity of the expression, new questions arising as I heard it repeatedly. What did it mean, I wondered, to be near, or far? Where was here; where was there? In order to view something clearly, should one gain distance, or step closer? With these questions, I experienced a shifting of spatial order, revealing my own tendency to shape life through routine and logic. I learned that this was ultimately a false narrative, preventing us from challenging our own position, and the position of others, in this world—a temporary palliative that blankets over the illegibility of trauma and its constant, unyielding interruptions of space.

My first conversation of the day began with an apology. “I’m sorry,” the Swedish-Cantonese artist Lap-See Lam said. “I don’t speak Chinese.” I assuaged her concerns by stating that I preferred English also, yet I was intrigued by our brief interaction, her prefacing of identity reflecting the ongoing discomfort between diasporic individualism versus a greater, collective ancestral knowledge. In Lam’s film, Mother’s Tongue (2018), made in collaboration with Wingyee Wu, a familiar story sets the scene: a diaspora daughter and mother are at odds, distanced by gaps in communication, the former speaking fluent Swedish and broken Cantonese, and the latter broken Swedish and fluent Cantonese. Yet as the three-part video work continues, it reveals not the autobiographical narrative but a hauntological one, shaped by space. First-person stories told in past, present, and future echo in a composite Chinese restaurant, meticulously—perhaps obsessively—rendered by the artist using 3D laser scans of dozens of establishments across Stockholm, all of them now shuttered. What was Lam’s role in this; why had she collected these spaces together? In those spectral scenes, I noticed an abrupt fracturing of the archive, the awkward gaps between walls and tables presenting as black holes. Lam refuses spatial consistency, instead choosing to reflect a fragmented, disjointed, and messy heritage, incomplete, and in many ways, indescribable.

Similarly, Trương Minh Quý refutes completion in The Tree House (2019), an 84-minute film about Vietnam’s Indigenous Ruc and Kor people whose cave homes and tree houses were destroyed during the Vietnam War. Trương’s film grapples with political displacement and trauma, imagined via various mechanisms of storytelling, including science fiction––the film opens with voiceover by a migrant living on Mars in 2045––and ethnographic research. By expanding the spatial possibilities of narrative, Trương posits the idea that realism in representation can also be a form of control, weighing the differences between those in government and authorship positions. As a result, the 16mm film appears like hallucinatory images or dreams, initiated by the filmmaker’s own vision of seeing a small house on a mountaintop from far away, many years ago.

Earlier that day, I sat down at a communal round table in the new M+ Moving Image Lounge to experience Lam’s short VR film, Phantom Banquet (2022). I listened to the story of a girl who vanishes through a mirror and enters the constructed world of Chinese restaurants. I was reminded that trauma, in particular within the communities of the marginalised, operates within the realm of the magical and the speculative, a reaction to a systemic loss of agency. The people who inhabit the houses, caves, and forests in Trương’s film were sometimes abruptly presented in negatives—where dark appears light, and light appears dark—thinning the borders between life and death, the living world and the underworld, our immersive experience of viewing and the physical strip of film itself. These intentional interruptions left me with many questions. If one does not even own their own time and space, then where is ‘here’ for that rootless person? Where can they belong? What does it mean, really, to be anywhere on this earth at all?

The demilitarised zone, colloquially known as the DMZ, provides a four-metre buffer between South and North Korea. Split at the land’s centre, the DMZ provides a clear boundary, but it could also be read as a mirror, reflecting the surreal inverse worlds that both sides experience daily. In his presentation, the Korean artist Noh Suntag showed us two near-identical images, clicking back and forth between them in a live display of spot the difference. One depicted the Lotte Tower shopping mall in South Korea, a monument to the country’s growing stronghold on global commerce, the other the Juche Tower in North Korea, built for Kim Il Sung’s 70th birthday. Aside from the differences in mist and skylines, the two towers presented the same aura of power, rising above their respective countries like lighthouses of economic and political strength.

With such images, Noh proposes a more empathetic view of both sides, suggesting that the concept of ‘here’ and ‘there’ is merely a construct, driven by a political agenda to keep two neighbours apart. In another series, he showed us blurred still images captured on a bus tour from Russia and China, stitched together in a compilation that expanded on the concept of the ‘moving image.’ As skewed and distorted views of the landscape crossed the screen, it felt as if we were on that bus itself, covertly documenting that strange no man’s land. This disorientation, Noh explained, expresses how he and other Koreans felt about the separation: that they were in a constant state of ‘divided dizziness,’ a war that had never truly found closure.

Closure, I realised, provides a sense of relief, but also fixes a position, fossilising it into place. During the screening of The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images (2011)—a film by Eric Baudelaire about the Japanese leader of an extremist left-wing faction and her subsequent self-exile in Beirut—I kept wondering how one can live in secrecy, without confirmation of identity, for 27 years. It was my second viewing of the film, having seen it once before in the very same cinema a few years prior, and as before, the details of a young May Shigenobu’s covert life in Lebanon were the details I recalled most vividly: the stories of how she had to conceal her name, how she hid her ethnicity. Shot in the style of fûkeiron (loosely translated as ‘landscape theory’), in which landscape images and footage reveals a political narrative, Baudelaire’s film seemed to enact a game of hide and seek, the camera’s eye moving constantly and diligently over rooftops and streets, construction sites and mountains. In the cinema, my eyes also traversed the screen, never finding closure, resting only to follow the narratives of clips from Masao Adachi’s films. This constant movement became a type of restlessness, exhausting yet never exhaustive. I was reminded of another moving image work, Recycling Cinema (1998) by Hong Kong artist Ellen Pau, in which the camera follows a car along a highway, before abruptly jerking back to follow another car, the same action repeating again and again. Because Pau’s film lacks a conclusive moment, a state of proregression occurs—a push and pull between progression and regression, cancelling each other out and leading to stasis. Similarly, Baudelaire’s film focuses on the idea of ‘anabasis’, which describes an army advancing inland to the interior of a country, or a retreat from a hostile territory. Here, movement, and its perceived direction, is ambiguous. When May and Fusako Shigenobu returned to Japan after decades hiding in Lebanon, were they advancing or retreating? Returning to their home, or leaving it? Did they feel far from themselves, or closer than they ever had before—and how did this pivotal moment define their past and their future, their reckoning of where, and how, they had spent their time in this world?

On several occasions that day, the artists were asked how they interpreted the theme of the day’s programme. Curiously, they all kept misquoting “here from afar” as “seeing from afar,” a Freudian slip that revealed their collective inclination toward the act of looking. Yet in attempting to witness or document the lives of others, such as in The Tree House, it became clear the impossibility of absolute fidelity, a tension that is often navigated in the space between fiction and documentary. There is a yearning in this impossible act too, felt in the tentative images of Lebanon and Tokyo taken by Baudelaire on Adachi’s behalf, or in the spectral figures that haunt Lam’s reconstructed diasporic Chinese restaurants.

It is ironic that this simple act of looking fixes the position of here and there, creating an irreconcilable distance between us and the other, or in the case of Noh’s examinations, us and us again. But perhaps this is also what makes the act alluring –– we look and we look, here and here again, the futile movements of our viewing the act of looking itself, the lens of the camera as insatiable as the human eye.