2004 "Temporary Tenant - Real(ty) Dreams", Hong Kong

Photographer: Roy Lee

On October 12, 2004, I rented a shop for one day in Lee Tung Street, better known as Wedding Card Street, in the Wanchai district, at the cost of HK$500.

I had nothing to sell.

The open and yet empty shop functioned as an anomaly, a phenomenon that passers-by couldn’t classify, as it challenged common-sense notions of capital valorization. The apparent absence of any utilitarian purpose could only be explained as an act of madness, a subversion of the unspoken rule of maximization of space for economic gain.

I just stood and sat in the shop, wearing a wig.

The next day the shop started selling shoes, a cheap consignment from a factory across the border. Under such conditions of acceleration and disappearance, the uncanny apparition took on the quality of a ghost, a figure always outpacing our awareness of it.

A few streets away, in the same neighbourhood, South-East Asian immigrants appear and disappear every night, women on a tourist visa sell their bodies, in Hong Kong they are worth more than in their countries, the prostitution of space becomes one with the space of prostitution. The global flows of capital, goods and labour all contribute to the hallucinatory character of the Hong Kong cityscape, which is inextricably linked to the speed of such flows. Disappearance becomes a consequence of speed as Ackbar Abbas noted. The speed of circulation and valorization of capital. The same logic that underpins the way urban space is written, erased, written over.