Juan de Zurbarán, Still life of apricots on a platter (c. 1640s), oil on canvas, 34.6 x 52.1cm
Some twenty years ago, a stranger stopped my parents inside a temple to bestow upon me a prophecy. Fortune is written on your son’s face, he tells my father. He will live a life of great abundance though nobody will assume this to be so, and his wealth will be like a pearl hidden among the reeds of a riverbank. This prophecy, my mother says, was read from the mole obscured by my right eyebrow, and though I remember neither the stranger’s face nor voice, in the years that followed I would find the essence of his person reappearing during moments of financial stress. In such moments I would touch the mole and recite the prophet’s words as a prayer to what I felt as struggle, or, as solace that the tribulation will pass and things will be fine. And though the prophet remained no more than a stranger, his divination formed the basis of my rejecting the legal profession to become a writer — a decision many have called reckless. It strikes me that my dogged belief in the prophecy might have less to do with the illusory promise of wealth than with the power of language, that I believe in the prophecy to give shape to the words which contain it. By virtue of the prophecy’s optimism, it has been easy to believe it without hesitation — without certainty, too, as to whether fortune will in fact follow. To have custody of the prophecy’s “truth”, in other words, is a means of getting closer to understanding the ways in which fortune comes about.
Several winters ago, in a city I barely knew, I found myself in a bar with fur lined walls the colour of cheap rouge, drinking wine of a similar vintage with men twice my age. I recalled the prophecy to a man named Nikolas and he took great offence to the idea that I would read into the words given to me at all. He believed that my interpretation of the prophecy as a mask for something more profound was obtuse, that there is nothing more to the idea of fortune than wealth. Abstracting the prophecy and choosing to live impecuniously, he continued, was telling of my character and exposed a central flaw: self-indulgence. Nikolas was a photographer whose clients paid him tens of thousands to shoot models on various runways across the world. In the pictures he showed me I couldn’t help but notice that all his subjects were evacuated of joy, and suffered from a particular brand of disaffection — an affect inherent to waifish bodies dripping in luxury fabrics, their limp eyes beaming down the barrel of his camera. These models represent a pedestrian form of beauty that the world has come to read as benign yet aspirational, though like all else functions as a veil for something operating along more sinister lines.
Susan Sontag called the camera a “predatory weapon” for its ability to render a subject into an object, and no clearer was this sentiment than in the type of images Nikolas took, for the fashion houses he worked. “My father was in banking but knew beauty,” he explains. “I travelled with him to showrooms in Paris and New York, and with time and hard work I became a photographer to express what he could see but never evoke.” I remember Nikolas as someone for whom the world existed in purely objective terms — which is to say he embodied the natural consequence of someone born into money. His grievance with my conception of fortune made sense. After all, he is someone to whom fortune was never a mystery.
A language you do not understand always appears as a kind of mass — an amorphous shadow that bleeds toward you from the horizon of another’s lips. I used to believe that one could sit idly and wait for this mass to arrive, that with the passing of time any language would demystify itself and reveal its logic, to allow one’s comprehension of it. I have realised that the shadowy mass I once perceived as the language of fortune moving toward me is not the language at all but rather the effects of it. If a shadow is always cast in reference to something antecedent, then fortune remains a place over there that throws such shadows over a terrain of empty space, creeping toward me in forms like rich men and bad artists (sometimes the two together). The shadows I cast cannot reach that place in which fortune lies, and fortune certainly has no interest in coming closer to me. And if fortune remains so far away and the shadows it casts are so aberrant, I wonder if the terrain separating us is worth crossing at all.
Last summer I found myself on Aegina, an island in the Saronic Gulf an hour south-west of Athens. Here, the distance between earth and sky was infinitely more compressed than any other place I’d been. Each night I sat by the port to observe how the firmament insisted on crushing the crests of nearby hills and mountains, which returned this assault by stabbing at the pink-streaked atmosphere that bled slowly into a thick and clotted blueness. This celestial exchange appeared as earth and sky sparring with one another, a form of combat where the goal was the other’s disintegration; a gorgeous way for the day to die. The bench I sat on each night was next to a kiosk owned by an older woman and her son, and in the afternoons I would visit them to purchase a beer and a small portion of pistachios in a hessian bag. On my fourth visit, the son — Yiannis — asked if he could watch the sunset with me after he finished work and took his mother home.
When he sat down he handed me a beer, telling me how strange it was for tourists to come to Aegina alone, and even stranger for them to spend their evenings watching the sunset in its entirety. Yiannis had recently returned to Aegina from national service, with his time away as a soldier affirming his desire to stay on the island forever. He suspected that I saw the same thing in the Saronic landscape that he did — something sublime and truer than anything else from the world in which I came. When I asked him what he meant by this, he couldn’t quite explain it. Conscription had taught him perspective, he said, that people never know they want too much. It is only when they are made to forfeit their way of life, he believes, that they realise life is not about consumption or the amassing of things. A silence mounts between us, and I watch him gaze into the horizon as if in search of the cavity between sea and sky, his pupils fluttering as they trace the heavy motions of the waves. The military strips away your identity so that all that’s left is an essence shared with other men, he continues, something exterior to objects and value. He turned to me and I found myself transfixed by his lips, now stained a dark orange by the glowing hearth of light which encased us. He made a point to smile before returning his gaze to the sea. “Soldiers love their country by loving the men beside them.” “Soldiers,” he announces, “are simple men.” There was a long silence after he said this, and I wondered if what he described was not so much the feeling of contentment but a more insidious form of resignation. That it was, in fact, the fascist uniformities inscribed into military life which rendered his desires into something so flat and straightforward. I decided against this line of questioning and asked whether my enchantment with the landscape could be just that — enchantment — rather than an act which signified an aspect of abnegation. Smirking, he moved closer, weaving his arm around my waist so that his fingers rested on my stomach. “You’re like me, I’m sure.”
At this point, the landscape had begun to wrap itself in shadows. Eventually, all I could see were the silhouettes of islands merging with the empyrean to disappear into utter darkness. A landscape content with its assassination. I stared into this vacant distance with the stranger’s arm around me, thinking about mutually assured destruction. In Death in Venice, Thomas Mann describes Hellenic masculinity through the prism of a foreigner beset with a fetish for the antique: “Pale, with a sweet reserve, with clustering honey-coloured ringlets, the brow and nose descending in one line, the winning mouth, the expression of pure and godlike serenity.” This is an image of victory, a deliberate rendering of Mann’s desire. His description conjures not only the Greek ideal, but, much like a prophecy, bears the burden of selling to us its fantasy. And, indeed, I was sold: Yiannis, the unassuming man I met at the pistachio stand, had evaporated, though perhaps he was never there at all. It was clear, in any case, that I was in the presence of a soldier, a man who had advanced toward me in full anticipation of surrender. The soldier knew well enough that his body — born of the landscape in which this tourist was so bewitched by — would be a locus of desire. It was a bold presumption, but one I did not displace. He moved closer and our thighs began to touch. He held my body close to his, our faces closer still. The darkness buoyed us up, but also worked to coax us down. There were no stars that night on Aegina — not that I can remember.
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung is a writer based in Berlin, and founding editor of institutional critique platform Decolonial Hacker. His work has been published in Griffith Review, The Saturday Paper, Art+Australia, 4A Papers and Running Dog, among others. He is currently the curatorial assistant at the Julia Stoschek Collection (Berlin/Düsseldorf).
Some twenty years ago, a stranger stopped my parents inside a temple to bestow upon me a prophecy. Fortune is written on your son’s face, he tells my father. He will live a life of great abundance though nobody will assume this to be so, and his wealth will be like a pearl hidden among the reeds of a riverbank. This prophecy, my mother says, was read from the mole obscured by my right eyebrow, and though I remember neither the stranger’s face nor voice, in the years that followed I would find the essence of his person reappearing during moments of financial stress. In such moments I would touch the mole and recite the prophet’s words as a prayer to what I felt as struggle, or, as solace that the tribulation will pass and things will be fine. And though the prophet remained no more than a stranger, his divination formed the basis of my rejecting the legal profession to become a writer — a decision many have called reckless. It strikes me that my dogged belief in the prophecy might have less to do with the illusory promise of wealth than with the power of language, that I believe in the prophecy to give shape to the words which contain it. By virtue of the prophecy’s optimism, it has been easy to believe it without hesitation — without certainty, too, as to whether fortune will in fact follow. To have custody of the prophecy’s “truth”, in other words, is a means of getting closer to understanding the ways in which fortune comes about.
Several winters ago, in a city I barely knew, I found myself in a bar with fur lined walls the colour of cheap rouge, drinking wine of a similar vintage with men twice my age. I recalled the prophecy to a man named Nikolas and he took great offence to the idea that I would read into the words given to me at all. He believed that my interpretation of the prophecy as a mask for something more profound was obtuse, that there is nothing more to the idea of fortune than wealth. Abstracting the prophecy and choosing to live impecuniously, he continued, was telling of my character and exposed a central flaw: self-indulgence. Nikolas was a photographer whose clients paid him tens of thousands to shoot models on various runways across the world. In the pictures he showed me I couldn’t help but notice that all his subjects were evacuated of joy, and suffered from a particular brand of disaffection — an affect inherent to waifish bodies dripping in luxury fabrics, their limp eyes beaming down the barrel of his camera. These models represent a pedestrian form of beauty that the world has come to read as benign yet aspirational, though like all else functions as a veil for something operating along more sinister lines.
Susan Sontag called the camera a “predatory weapon” for its ability to render a subject into an object, and no clearer was this sentiment than in the type of images Nikolas took, for the fashion houses he worked. “My father was in banking but knew beauty,” he explains. “I travelled with him to showrooms in Paris and New York, and with time and hard work I became a photographer to express what he could see but never evoke.” I remember Nikolas as someone for whom the world existed in purely objective terms — which is to say he embodied the natural consequence of someone born into money. His grievance with my conception of fortune made sense. After all, he is someone to whom fortune was never a mystery.
A language you do not understand always appears as a kind of mass — an amorphous shadow that bleeds toward you from the horizon of another’s lips. I used to believe that one could sit idly and wait for this mass to arrive, that with the passing of time any language would demystify itself and reveal its logic, to allow one’s comprehension of it. I have realised that the shadowy mass I once perceived as the language of fortune moving toward me is not the language at all but rather the effects of it. If a shadow is always cast in reference to something antecedent, then fortune remains a place over there that throws such shadows over a terrain of empty space, creeping toward me in forms like rich men and bad artists (sometimes the two together). The shadows I cast cannot reach that place in which fortune lies, and fortune certainly has no interest in coming closer to me. And if fortune remains so far away and the shadows it casts are so aberrant, I wonder if the terrain separating us is worth crossing at all.
Last summer I found myself on Aegina, an island in the Saronic Gulf an hour south-west of Athens. Here, the distance between earth and sky was infinitely more compressed than any other place I’d been. Each night I sat by the port to observe how the firmament insisted on crushing the crests of nearby hills and mountains, which returned this assault by stabbing at the pink-streaked atmosphere that bled slowly into a thick and clotted blueness. This celestial exchange appeared as earth and sky sparring with one another, a form of combat where the goal was the other’s disintegration; a gorgeous way for the day to die. The bench I sat on each night was next to a kiosk owned by an older woman and her son, and in the afternoons I would visit them to purchase a beer and a small portion of pistachios in a hessian bag. On my fourth visit, the son — Yiannis — asked if he could watch the sunset with me after he finished work and took his mother home.
When he sat down he handed me a beer, telling me how strange it was for tourists to come to Aegina alone, and even stranger for them to spend their evenings watching the sunset in its entirety. Yiannis had recently returned to Aegina from national service, with his time away as a soldier affirming his desire to stay on the island forever. He suspected that I saw the same thing in the Saronic landscape that he did — something sublime and truer than anything else from the world in which I came. When I asked him what he meant by this, he couldn’t quite explain it. Conscription had taught him perspective, he said, that people never know they want too much. It is only when they are made to forfeit their way of life, he believes, that they realise life is not about consumption or the amassing of things. A silence mounts between us, and I watch him gaze into the horizon as if in search of the cavity between sea and sky, his pupils fluttering as they trace the heavy motions of the waves. The military strips away your identity so that all that’s left is an essence shared with other men, he continues, something exterior to objects and value. He turned to me and I found myself transfixed by his lips, now stained a dark orange by the glowing hearth of light which encased us. He made a point to smile before returning his gaze to the sea. “Soldiers love their country by loving the men beside them.” “Soldiers,” he announces, “are simple men.” There was a long silence after he said this, and I wondered if what he described was not so much the feeling of contentment but a more insidious form of resignation. That it was, in fact, the fascist uniformities inscribed into military life which rendered his desires into something so flat and straightforward. I decided against this line of questioning and asked whether my enchantment with the landscape could be just that — enchantment — rather than an act which signified an aspect of abnegation. Smirking, he moved closer, weaving his arm around my waist so that his fingers rested on my stomach. “You’re like me, I’m sure.”
At this point, the landscape had begun to wrap itself in shadows. Eventually, all I could see were the silhouettes of islands merging with the empyrean to disappear into utter darkness. A landscape content with its assassination. I stared into this vacant distance with the stranger’s arm around me, thinking about mutually assured destruction. In Death in Venice, Thomas Mann describes Hellenic masculinity through the prism of a foreigner beset with a fetish for the antique: “Pale, with a sweet reserve, with clustering honey-coloured ringlets, the brow and nose descending in one line, the winning mouth, the expression of pure and godlike serenity.” This is an image of victory, a deliberate rendering of Mann’s desire. His description conjures not only the Greek ideal, but, much like a prophecy, bears the burden of selling to us its fantasy. And, indeed, I was sold: Yiannis, the unassuming man I met at the pistachio stand, had evaporated, though perhaps he was never there at all. It was clear, in any case, that I was in the presence of a soldier, a man who had advanced toward me in full anticipation of surrender. The soldier knew well enough that his body — born of the landscape in which this tourist was so bewitched by — would be a locus of desire. It was a bold presumption, but one I did not displace. He moved closer and our thighs began to touch. He held my body close to his, our faces closer still. The darkness buoyed us up, but also worked to coax us down. There were no stars that night on Aegina — not that I can remember.
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung is a writer based in Berlin, and founding editor of institutional critique platform Decolonial Hacker. His work has been published in Griffith Review, The Saturday Paper, Art+Australia, 4A Papers and Running Dog, among others. He is currently the curatorial assistant at the Julia Stoschek Collection (Berlin/Düsseldorf).
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.