Although images and sounds can document a location, the sense of a place is more often shaped by how it is remembered, forgotten, or conceived in the mind. A place can be tinged with melancholic nostalgia or continuously rediscovered, existing between recollection and loss. They constantly form new, interstitial links to our other sensations and narratives about where we were and where we wished we could have been.

Midi Z’s The Palace on the Sea (2013) follows a Burmese migrant in Taiwan in a fragmented narrative as she wanders between a car repair shop and a floating vessel, evoking the haunting experience of displacement and an oneiric longing for home. Capturing the personal and collective resonance of the Yau Ma Tei district, Dorothy Cheung’s Reverberation (2023) is a delicate tone poem where juxtaposed or overlaying imagery reflects the weight of memory imprinted on other remembrances. Cici Wu’s Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon (2019) reimagines the unsettling disappearance of an autistic boy at the Hong Kong–Shenzhen border as an enlightened and spiritual journey to retrieve lost memories. In Non-place, Other Space (2009), Linda Chiu-han Lai reassembles everyday scenes from her personal archive of Hong Kong and Macau between 1991 and 2008, showing sites transformed by urban development to prompt critical reflection on the present. Finally, Peng Zuqiang’s Sight Leak (2022) uses Super 8 and 16 mm footage of Changsha, paired with offscreen voices, to explore the wayward nature of the gaze—how it creates desire and silently participates in the collective formation of the identity of a place and its people.