Remembering is an embodied experience. There are memories that unravel suddenly, without exertion or intention. Many resurface when our bodies reunite with places and beings that we’ve had relationships with. But others are dormant or stowed-away, which makes bringing them to the surface an active relocation, recollection, and review.

This is a murky resurfacing of Displaced Nostalgia: Not So Personal (2025) by artist JeeMin Kim and novelist Sheung-King, a durational performance that held me, one afternoon sixty-two weeks ago, on March 28, 2025. This event borrowed its structure from Displaced Nostalgia: Ritual (2024), the initial iteration of their collaboration that took place in a former church in Seoul where JeeMin and Sheung-King went through a series of sequential actions and periods of intentional rest in the absence of time-telling devices. (JeeMin reconfigures the space and fixes a light bulb when she feels that an hour has passed; when the light bulb moves, Sheung-King writes. They repeat the sequence four times, resting in between.) In creating a transient, unanchored space, where embodied tempo and cyclical gestures collapse linear time, JeeMin and Sheung-King reflect on dislocation as they experience it.

What might it mean to dedicate time, space, and energy to contemplating nostalgia and displacement here, in Hong Kong, a culture most known for “disappearing”?11A term borrowed from Ackbar Abbas’s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (University of Minnesota Press, 1997). And what is displacement to a culture that has been—and arguably, still is trying to be—afloat, transient, flexible, fluid?

The Hong Kong performance was a response to the solo exhibition No Such Person (2025) at WMA Space, Anson Hoi-shan Mak’s autoethnographic “re-visit[ing of] her archive”22Anson Mak: No Such Person at WMA Space, January 24, 2025–March 31, 2025, https://wma.hk/exhibitions/anson-mak-no-such-person. that curator Chloe Chow traced through that artist’s frequent relocations and the social transformations she engaged with along the way. Displaced Nostalgia was performed within that show and lasted for however long JeeMin felt was seven hours—ringing a bell after each hour seemed to pass.

To be in conversation with the work’s felt and embodied time, and its intricate overlaps between writing and performance (and writing as performance), I have forgone watching the recorded documentation of Displaced Nostalgia and write here, instead, with my unreliable memories and the notes I scribbled on the performance’s accompanying booklet.

Arriving

The invitation noted that our phones would be collected and watches would be covered upon entry. When I arrived, friendly folks greeted me by the door. I sent a quick text to a friend before handing over my phone, which they wrapped carefully beside a few others in a small basket. The space was dark, illuminated largely by many projections on different walls. Noticing a curtain with a silhouette belonging to one of the performers in a far corner, I decided to coexist with them without yet being their viewer and wander around the exhibition first.

Anson’s works are intimate. The sounds that accompanied us in the space were from her moving image works, including Floating City (music video) and Real Show (both 2025), two pieces that ruminate deeply on the lived conditions of being in Hong Kong. It was with this context and a feeling of intimacy that I entered the performance.

Taking time

Anson’s exhibition was organized as a series of interconnected rooms with multiple passageways, two of which eventually led to Displaced Nostalgia. A thin curtain separated the two performers; they were in the same space but did not share it. They felt each other’s presence—their quiet shuffling, inhales and exhales, the minute movements of their silhouettes—but could not touch. JeeMin and Sheung-King communicated through a sequence of gestures, which allowed them to feel time together. I unknowingly entered Sheung-King’s side of the curtain first: He was sitting on a beanbag, resting. Acetate papers with texts handwritten by the novelist as well as visitors were neatly lined up next to him, one after the other. One of the pages read: “I have been feeling…” and “I am becoming a refugee in my home city…”

Across from him was an overhead projector displaying a question (“I ask you: What does it mean for time to paint a shadow of nothingness?”) and a few responses onto the curtain, the light extending outward onto the walls, the ceiling, and even on Sheung-King’s body. Someone wrote: “I don’t want to die here. I don’t want to die in the city.” While the writer could have been referring to any city, I think about my here, Hong Kong. I resurface 2019; I recall reading about the anxieties before 1997. These moments when time accelerates and you are forced to contend with futures that become murky and the quiet nostalgia that follows. Many have left as a response.

On the other side of the curtain, JeeMin sat still on a sofa surrounded by a disarray of objects suspended in the midst of being packed away: FedEx boxes awkwardly resting on the floor, on a desk, and on each other, while a ladder took up space in the middle of the room alongside a suitcase (a sign of movement, arrival/departure). Above, a bell hung from a cord, near a chandelier. The scene felt like one’s last night at an apartment before moving out. This “transformation of place,” to reference literary scholar Ackbar Abbas’s writings about Hong Kong, can cause one to lose their sense of place without necessarily having to leave to somewhere else. The anxieties of displacement are not specific only to those who have migrated, but are shared with those whose situatedness in a place has been disrupted, often in places that are in flux or undergoing intense transformation.

Then JeeMin rearranged the space. This time, she placed a chair and a desk in the middle of the room and sat on the chair. She rang the bell, feeling like an hour had passed, then put her head down on the desk to rest.

Departing

Sheung-King began writing after the bell rang. His new prompt was open-ended and addressed the audience: “The body sometimes forgets to feel discomfort. Write about a time when you forgot to feel comfortable.”

Nostalgia can be comfortable; the past, distanced by time, can be a safe and familiar place to be. All the while the uncertainty of the future makes the dislocated present even more overwhelming and uncomfortable. Like JeeMin trying to find rest in an unsettled space, how do we allow ourselves to sit with discomfort? Borrowing the words of Oscar Ho as he wrote about Hong Kong post-handover, how can we “no longer [be] afraid of being overwhelmed”?33Quoted from Oscar Ho’s essay first published in Art Journal, “Hong Kong: A Curatorial Journey for an Identity” (1998).

I started making out the contours of JeeMin’s head as a silhouette. She barely moved, though I felt her looking through the fabric at us. JeeMin could read the projections of Sheung-King’s writings on the curtain between them, but from her perspective the text was mirrored. I wondered if they felt isolated, or if simply feeling that the other was there provided them with companionship. I felt distanced, too. Even though Sheung-King prompted us to write with him, he would be seated away from us, resting, when we wrote.

Perhaps isolation comes as an inevitable part of displacement and nostalgia. While we may share it as overarching feelings of longing and loss, our specific situatedness is sometimes only ours to carry. Eventually, JeeMin started shifting, and I walked over to watch her reconfigure her space again. As she restructured, I felt afloat, removed from time and space. Afloat, as Hong Kong has been—a port/al, a space of transit, moving in our own malleable time. She rang the bell.

My recall ends here, as this is the furthest into the sedimentation of that afternoon that I can go. I feel now, as I write, what I felt going down on the elevator, after coexisting with the performance: excited to be overwhelmed, uncomfortable, and uncertain. More than two hours had passed.