(Twenty-two
by seven inches, sepia-toned silver gelatin print, 1992) Woman
with Butterfly. Cindy poses in Lan Kwai Fong, the cobble-stoned
street
narrow, sloped, and crowded with the bars and nightclubs that have
made the area so popular with expatriates. I shot this early in
the morning, so the street is empty. In her palm, Cindy holds a
butterfly; it
looks alive,
feeding off of Cindy’s overflowing vitality.
She
wears only a gauzy dress and looks ethereal against this stark
background. I saw that contrast
as the metaphor for the exhibit: open-air,
above the street in Lan Kwai Fong, the beautiful on display in
a barfly’s
alley.
In the background, Handsome Herman lurks in a shadowed doorway.
At the first showing, a friend asked if I had caught him unaware,
checking on his girlfriend.
Herman knew I was in love. Everyone did, but no, I put him in the shot intentionally.
In the photo, the shadows distort the angularity of his face, revealing him
as an American, an ugly American, who cannot bring himself to
remember or pronounce
Cindy’s true, Chinese name: Miu Ngor. Funny
Moth.
We
soon returned to Lan Kwai Fong for the Chinese New Year, Cindy,
Herman, and I. On a normal night, the district
overflows
with people, reducing the
bars to
standing room only. But on that New Year’s Eve, twenty-one people
died, suffocated beneath a sudden crush of drunken bodies.
The
images I have of that night are not burned into photosensitive
paper.
They are burned into my mind. I see Herman trapped, pinned beneath the
crush of
people, as are we all. Cindy screams as her ankle snaps, but Herman turns
blue and dies
as we watch.
The
media placed the blame on the streets, the police, the bad
weather, and then, finally, on our exhibit. What began
as a rumor soon hit the
newspapers, and the
cover of East Weekly featured Osbert Lam’s work, entitled Stun,
a close-up of a walnut shell carved with the figures of thirty monks,
which the fung shui
experts said prophesied the tragedy. Another work was said to resemble
a gravestone; another, gifts given to the dead. My Woman with Butterfly
took on a ghostly significance,
especially now that the man lurking in the doorway numbered among the
dead. The accused works, the entire exhibit, came down.
*****
(Seven
by fifteen inches, black and white with red filter, 1996)
Wedding. Cindy and I look out over Hong Kong Harbor;
she is in one of her wedding
dresses-the
filter catching its deep red like a flame-while I, in my black
tux, am almost invisible. Later, I tried to stop her from hanging
the
print in
our apartment.
Ultimately, though, I could do nothing without revealing my fears,
and I could hardly admit to myself that it was the fung shui
of the piece
that concerned
me.
*****
(Eight
by eight inches, color, 1997) Coin. Against a background
of red silk, a close up of the five pence coin with its royal
cameo-officially
shot to
commemorate the turnover of Hong Kong. In truth, I now suspected
Cindy’s infidelity.
The coin’s shape signified the essence of heaven. Its
vibrations with the energy of the earth and mankind were
meant to bring
good fortune and save our
marriage.
I
hung it on the wall facing the framed print of Wedding. At
first it gave me some peace, but soon the open
space between
the prints
grew tense
and
furtive. The battles that raged within us somehow began,
I
knew, in those flat, frozen
planes. One night, while Cindy was out with her “friends”,
I removed Wedding from its frame and set it ablaze in the
kitchen sink. The acrid smoke
lingered with the promise of change.
*****
(Fifteen
by twenty-two inches, sepia, 2000) Resting Place. A rare
hillside graveyard
overlooking the New Territories:
headstones
in
the foreground,
towering apartment
complexes in the distance. A comforter and pillow lay
across a grave-a tombstone for its headboard. I mailed a
print to Cindy’s
latest lover. His complex, the very window to his apartment,
is the subtle
and always overlooked center
of the shot.
*****
(Twenty-two
by seven inches, sepia-toned silver gelatin print, 2005)
Woman with Butterfly II. For this,
I duplicated
the
placement of
the camera and
even obtained
an identical butterfly. It lacks the illusion of
life, posed on one of the cobblestones, but I’ve always
felt that its new lifelessness only helped the
intent of the work.
Cindy poses in Handsome Herman’s doorway,
partially obscured by the shadows. Thirteen years
and a dozen
lovers have left their
mark, but even half hidden
in shadow, she remains ethereal and bewitching.
Instead of the gauzy dress, she wears a white kimono.
One bare
foot
is set atop
a lily.
The lily is death. I
wanted the foot to represent the crush of people
that would take that famous mouth and turn it blue.
Perhaps,
though,
I missed
my symbolism.
The
street, like any long passage full of doors, is deadly fung
shui, but I chose carefully the
doorway
in which
she stands. I stole her
from Handsome
Herman years
ago. Now I would send her back to him.
I
hung the framed print with jittery anticipation. In an apartment
of eight-hundred square feet,
a little fung
shui
should work
its rot like
yeast through
dough. So I waited, but months passed, and
her
full mouth remained pink and adulterous.
Then,
late one night, after she had returned home and fallen asleep,
I began the desperate
search for
what
must be there.
I had expected
to find
prints
of Wedding, haunting
me from their forgotten lairs. Instead, I found
my display print of
Woman with Butterfly,
the
very print that had
hung above
the cobbled
streets of Lan Kwai Fong.
Cindy
flirted with me from within her shallow space, but I could
see now that the veneer
of her beauty
covered a
shadowed
alley of
a soul.
The contrast
had
never been the woman and the place, but the
image and the reality.
I took a sudden, deep breath and smelt the
lingering fragrance of smoke-that old promise
of change.
A fire, I thought,
would be so
cleansing. I
rolled Woman with Butterfly into a mailing
tube and sent it to an old friend.
The picture
deserved to survive. It was all that had
even been good about her.
I
soaked the walls in developing fluid. |