Kristofer Heng

The face.

The face in the crowd. The face on the screen. The face in the cave, on the wall. Smiley face. Fresh faced. New face. Facial recognition. Asking ‘What’s his face’? Till you’re blue in the face.  

We live alongside more stuff now than before we can remember, objects, histories, selective collective memories, hoarding, collecting; the accumulation of sweet figments. The figments making up a life, a body, a face.  

Photos used to be paintings, rare, embedded in architectural space and ritual. Images used to be photos, an event, a staying-still for the exposure to occur, alchemic before the eye. Now images have become the “feed”, a quantitative gathering of data points to be used to generate other data points to be used to send another billionaire into space. Our feed is the continuous refreshing of things and the world as idea. But still, the feelings and senses come through the cracks and glitches as we scroll with our fingers, down on all fours, a way through the miasma of scanning and skimming is daunting but possible. I hope.    

Around 2017, I began living in the deep suburbs in Florida. Authoritarian reactionary vehement on the national stage. Sowing distrust, suspicion and scorn for luminous movements, reflective exuberance, intimate life. What they’re really scared of is freedom from fitting in, which is true belonging. To belong is to be vulnerable. And to be vulnerable is to be at peace with being a person.     

But it’s hard to be a person, it’s hard to be someone. Fighting, not fighting. Having to fight, not having enough energy to fight. Fighting, not knowing how to fight, or that you even need to fight, and not knowing what you are fighting for. Knowing, not knowing how the fight is never really finished. We smile through things, it’s part of the work of living. We grieve behind closed doors, we grieve together in a crowd. We feel uncertain about the future and we think we remember the past. We go on building meaning from the forms around us, from what has been left lying around in all this accumulation and suspicion, from what’s at arm’s reach, from the bits and fragments leftover. And after a fight, reconstructing a face, a person, a life, from having to fight all the god damn time, to be able to be a person, just a face, in the crowd.