Absence II, 2020

Wai Ming Lung  

Absence II is part of the WTDRMS (Wet Dreams) exhibition which took place at the Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles in 2022. Intimate and carnal, WTDRMS deals with the love relationship and absence by retracing an inner journey without route, duration or movement. This visual poem recounts sometimes the ephemeral embrace, sometimes the separation, the contact of sheets heavy with sweat and already cold, or even the anesthetic and refractory kiss of post-coital dysphoria.

After the act, the bodies separate inexorably, the lovers sink into a mute sleep, a slow solitary drowning that resounds like a stifled cry in a pillow. The semantics are borrowed from the great masters of the Baroque, from the obsessively romantic drapery, to the chiaroscuro, passing through the mannered still life and the body floating dramatically in an upward fall, but the craftsmanship is minimalist and the subject unfailingly contemporary in its narration. of the moment.