Two Thousand Lights Over Hong Kong
The first thing that held me was the photography from inside Tokyo’s abandoned Seika Student Dormitory—room after room of tatami gone gray with dust, stairwells overtaken by debris, a whole building sitting in the middle of the city with everything still inside it, just stopped. Tokyo’s density usually suggests that nothing can stay unclaimed for long, that every square meter has a function and a plan. And then there’s a building the city apparently decided to simply look past, indefinitely. The images had the quality of a place that had become private by accident—too far gone to use, too intact to demolish.
Chemical X was making collages from ecstasy pills, pressing hundreds of them in different colors into faces and patterns and abstractions. The medium being the message, obviously, but also not entirely, because the arrangements were formally interesting on their own terms—the kind of work where the concept carries it halfway and the execution carries it the rest. At the other scale entirely, Jim Campbell installed two thousand responsive lights across a Hong Kong street, each one reacting to the presence of people moving underneath. A drug-art piece and a public light installation, both solving for the same thing: making you aware of accumulation.
Martins was illustrating his Tinder matches—turning split-second swipe decisions into actual drawings, spending real time on faces that had been processed in a fraction of a second. Something about converting that reflex into labor felt like both a critique and a kind of apology. The drawings were good. The project was better as a concept than as an image collection, but the concept was worth the time.
PornHub launched a record label that week. I noted this with the flat affect it deserved and moved on. The Game of Thrones opening sequence re-edited with a man sitting alone eating soup in place of all the orchestral map-spinning turned out to be a significant improvement. Kirsten Dunst made a short film about selfies and social media presence for a fashion magazine, the kind of celebrity commentary you expect to dismiss, except she was genuinely uncomfortable on screen in a precise way—not performing awkwardness, just being in it.
A Chinese restaurant had been seasoning its noodles with ground opium poppies to keep customers coming back, which was discovered and shut down, which seems obvious in retrospect and also like something you’d accept as normal if you found out it was everywhere. A Vietnamese architecture firm built a house designed around trees rather than despite them—concrete floors and walls interrupted by plant life, the structure organized so the greenery had room to grow through it. A Japanese illustrated cookbook turned out to be, on closer inspection, less about food than about the specific texture of mother-daughter relationships, with meals as the occasion rather than the subject.
That was the particular quality of the internet that Sunday in 2014: a lot of things stranger than they needed to be, from angles you hadn’t anticipated. Not news. Just the residue of a week, what it left on the screen.