Disappearance

This series transforms portraits of stateless children in Arunothai, Northern Thailand, into lenticular images that oscillate between vibrant color and stark black-and-white. These dual visual layers stage a continuous negotiation of identity and perception: the colorful bursts capture the vivid, lived reality of these young individuals, while the fading into monochrome metaphors their “absence” and gradual disappearance within legal and social archives.

This visual oscillation mirrors the precarious existence of these children, who are born into a state of permanent legal “suspension.” Through the physical interaction inherent to the lenticular medium, viewers are forced to move their bodies to maintain the image’s clarity—an act that simulates the constant negotiation stateless people must undertake to remain “visible” within the social fabric. By utilizing this experimental moving image format, the project translates abstract identity politics into a tangible, sensory experience, reconstructing micro-memories that teeter on the edge of disappearance.

Through the viewer’s movement, identity flickers, dissolves, and re-forms, mirroring the unstable visibility of those living at the edges of documentation systems. The work meditates on disappearance not as absence, but as a condition produced through bureaucratic and social vision.