WAITING FOR A FRIEND
2019, ongoing
dimensions variable

presented as part of Gentle Disruptions exhibition at Union Gallery

In 白雙全’s Waiting For a Friend (Without Appointment), the artist stands in a Hong Kong MTR station until he encounters someone he knows. Of the photographs documenting the action, two are wide shots taken from the same perspective—the artist’s view as he waits. We see commuters mid-step and blurred. The walls of the concourse are tiled in a specific blue. Each image has a different cast, save for a persistent figure in high white boots, marking the time in between these scenes. A third photograph shows the artist standing near one of the station’s exits. A man in white is posted a pace away, near but not familiarly close. His feet are pointed in one direction while his torso and head turn in the opposite, deliberately towards Pak. We might imagine the ensuing exchange going something like this: You’ve been here a while, what are you doing, Waiting for a friend.

On multiple occassions, I wait in the park for 4 hours, each time for a queer acquaintance to happen by. This ongoing series of actions looks to 白雙全's work to consider how waiting—the temporality of cruising—might constitute an intervention and to speculate what the specific resonances of cruising postcolonial Hong Kong might propose as new spatial, social and mnemonic practices. 

acknowledgement: Sidney Blackburn, for witnessing and photographing part of this series