Silent Echo

Kim Lu

PhotoForum Featured Portfolio, 17 October 2020

Essay by Nina Seja for PhotoForum

We think differently: Lockdown, memories, and Kim Lu’s Silent Echo

There are moments in the calendar that take us out of ordinary time: family rituals for life events, annual holidays, religious commemorations. These are often smaller scale though, and typically expected. It has been a great many decades since the international community has been unified by something that takes us out of ordinary time (such as the world wars) – until now. Lockdown: it’s a shared condition that’s both global and remarkably individual. It’s produced new ways of being (worldviews; philosophies) and doing (work; relationships). In a simultaneous turning inward and outward, lockdown has intensified how we engage with the world, ourselves, and others.

Kim Lu’s portfolio Silent Echo encapsulates all these elements. In an unhurried way, the photographs consider the moods of lockdown, and of the photographer herself. The images are arresting, not in a shocking form, but instead through how they create a language for this unusual time.

A teammate remarked that in lockdown, time consists of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This exceptional temporal change, razing out the rigors and hecticness of only days before, shifted our attention to that which is immediately in front of us. During this time period, Lu mapped her surrounds. “I have images of every corner of my house – each corner, everywhere, is in my camera now. That’s basically what I did in lockdown – spending time with my daughter and taking photos.” The acuteness of vision slows down the act of looking, whereby Lu’s gaze rests on everyday items, slowly transforming them into the abstract. In one, diagonal slices of light render the tufts of carpet a site of anticipation. Taken at midnight with the moon coming through, there’s an unknown narrative, rich with potential.

 An incantation accompanies the images: “A sense of timelessness, quietness. Shadows and darkness, strangeness and longing,” Lu says. They’re not disconcerting – more as if being offered a window into Lu’s atmospheric dreamscapes.

An edge of a grey sweatshirt hangs over a chair, the damp automatically creating shivers down the spine and empathetic skin reflexively imagining what the wet fabric would feel like against the flesh. There’s a decided attention to light and reflection, which creates a sense of being simultaneously inside and outside of architectural space. It’s cinematic in its noir-like diffusion and steel and tan-brown palette. The visual absence of people dominates. However, that’s not to say they’re not present. Like in lockdown, we couldn’t see the life, communion, and the activity of others, but the senses were attuned to fellow citizens, shuttered behind closed doors. 

In this liminal state, it’s difficult to not turn one’s own attention to the details that are in our own living spaces, where the everyday is highlighted, contemplated. Lu acknowledges that “she’s been mindful of small voices and valuing small things.” A cicada shell is likewise caught in this zone beyond time, luminous. Like human life, it too has been transfixed in stillness.

Though all the photos were taken during lockdown – and are strongly resonant for all of us who have had our lives quietened by the pandemic – the series is greater than just the lockdown. “In some ways, it’s taken during lockdown but it’s not all about lockdown and COVID,” Lu says. “It’s still about my memories, my identity. It’s about me.” This can be seen in the aforementioned scene with the moonlight. In the dead of the night, in the witching hour, there’s a lot of space to think. “In this particular time, I feel myself as being between waking and sleeplessness,” the photographer says. As a single mother, unable to fall asleep, “It’s a feeling of myself, suffering with my life. I’ve captured that moment of my memory, to remind myself. Every time I see this image, it reminds me of this memory.”

This feeling of time and the body slowing – and of memories tripping over reality – is like becoming a somnambulist. “I’m finding a way to express the state of being between sleep and wakefulness,” Lu says. This blurring of what is real or not can be seen in one image, which has the series’ sole visual depiction of the human body. One leg extends from beyond the frame, going to where, and from what, it’s not clear. The cavernous foreground leading to the setting of bed, crumpled sheets, a shingled roof, suggests a theatrical set piece for a story in media res. The photographer invites us into her psychological space – though abstracted, it’s deeply personal.

Without the noise of everyday life, the vast, changeable landscape of our emotions had weeks to find expression. Lu acknowledges that “Over lockdown, our house became a container.” A container for our experiences, memories, anxieties, and hopes. New Zealand, too, is now like a huge container because we can’t really leave. There’s one image that would typically suggest shock – a smashed vase, surrounded by minute glass particles. But even this is muted and the gaze is directed to the impossibility of putting the fragments back together. The vase, too, carries with it a silent echo.

It’s unsurprising that Lu’s primary influence is Rinko Kawauchi, who is also interested in everyday things, poeticism, and the expansiveness that comes from letting time grow and envelop us. Kawauchi’s attention to overlooked elements – the textures of watermelon, the interplay of light on branches – directs the viewer to the contemplative possibilities that surround us.

Such qualities can also be found in Lu’s work. As Lu’s portfolio shows, “During lockdown, you think differently.” It allowed us to think about the unknowable, not being sure of what life was going to look like afterwards. Being in a contained space also meant turning inwards, to the spaces that sustain us – seeing, for perhaps the first time, the moonlight filtering through the living room at midnight.  

Nina Seja is a writer and researcher based in Auckland.

Kim Lu resides in Auckland and is currently studying photography at Unitec . As a photographer who records everyday moments, Lu finds herself torn between being an active participant and a separated observer. Documenting the everyday becomes a way to be part of the flow and cycle of human practices. Lu’s photographs ask the audience to consider the mysterious in the everyday occurrence . 

Published with support from Creative New Zealand.