Bela Vista
2015–2021
35mm film
For six years, I lived in the infamous Bela Vista Villa. Every day, I looked out my window.
The view was always the same, but the scene was always different.
“Bela Vista Villa is infamous in Hong Kong for being haunted. It’s a place where many people over the years, doomed lovers in particular, have rented weekend holiday homes in which to spend their final moments.
After a suicide, the building is often painted a different color - light pastel oranges, yellows, pinks, and blues - so that the next guests won’t be able to identify it through pictures in the newspaper.
On the weekends, lively groups of friends and families spill out of the small holiday rentals and choke the narrow lanes with thick barbecue smoke.
The parties last into the small hours of the morning, keeping the ghosts at bay until roaming packs of wild dogs arrive to pick through discarded pork chop bones and fish balls.
In the mornings, the sun rises over the smokestacks on Lamma Island. Black kites swirl over the row of squat beachfront blocks and dive into the shallows for fish.
The neighborhood grows quiet as the weekend revelers board their ferries and return to the city. Fishermen in makeshift rafts of discarded windsurfing boards and styrofoam boxes paddle out to set their nets.
In the evenings, the sea often becomes calm and flat, taking on a softer and more slippery texture. Herons perch on barely submerged rocks and wait for their moment to strike. The fishermen paddle out again to collect their nets, and the wild dogs return from foraging and make their way towards the far end of the beach where it becomes rocky and meets the forest. The snakes - sometimes pythons - make their way out of the forest towards the buildings where rodents are in regular supply.
Occasionally on moonless nights, phosphorescent algae glimmers in the waves.
Changes in tide deliver washed-up debris: two baby finless porpoises, one wild boar, a bloated golden retriever, a headless mannequin, several cardboard boxes of brand new GAP sweatshirts, a fish large enough to feed ten, rusty oil barrels, jellyfish of various sizes ranging from tennis balls to a basketballs, tangled fishing nets, a styrofoam box full of chicken, deflated swimming floaties, toxic puffer fish that my puppy Manny kept swallowing without any ill effects, crab shells that Rocky liked to chew on, gas canisters, broken wooden oars from dragon boat races, lots of flip flops, and lots and lots of miscellaneous plastic.
Every year there is a week in spring when a fog rolls in and the other islands on the horizon disappear. For a moment after you wake up, it feels like Cheung Chau is slowly drifting away from the city. It is not an unwelcome sensation.
In the summer and fall, typhoons test the foundations, pounding the concrete footings hard enough to knock things off my shelves. The spray of the waves shoots up over the three-story buildings, and I’ve carried driftwood logs thicker than my leg down from the rooftop. Saltwater and sideways rain force their way through the poorly sealed windows and leave webs of stains on the paint that crack and peel off the wall like scabs.
It is said that the contractor who built these buildings so many years ago was jailed for using sub-par materials and the wrong type of sand in the concrete. Each typhoon makes you re-consider adding another year to the lease, but you always do. The rent is cheap and you can’t beat the view.
I’ve moved three times within Bela Vista Villa. Each time I moved to a higher floor, and each time there were cracks along the beams. None of the apartments had any ghosts that I was aware of, though one of the buildings had recently been repainted a pale yellow…”
excerpt from Bela Vista photobook
purchase the book
exhibition details. Inter-Island Festival 2023
Bela Vista Villa, Cheung Chau Island, Hong Kong