The new pace affects the way I see others - new lines of sight are established – and informs my understanding of and alignment with that space. In the bright maze I lose my shadow and gain fragmented and multiplied images of myself. Reflected in shop windows - where glass serves as the signifier of representation and display - reflected in polished stainless steel pillars and ceiling panels, my body blends into the surface. Space starts to look back. On the warping mirror plane the distance between bodies is erased. Through my corporeal exertion and inscription the mall becomes a site full of promises, despite its limited spontaneity.   The erotic promises of shopping malls are well-known to the local gay community. The top three cruising spots in HK are up-market shopping centers (Pacific Place, Festival Walk, International Finance Centre). Their location is easy to reach by public transport from most districts, their architectural image is an elective minimalism, the polished products of the sensuous and seductive editorial pages of glossy fashion magazines. It’s a mise en scene that supports the dream-state of fashion, glorifies the scenographic and privileged places identified as 'de luxe' and 'elite'.

I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up before the surface; i am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there… The mirror makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces   If my body may be said to enshrine a generative principle, at once abstract and concrete, the mirror's surface makes this principle invisible, deciphers it. The mirror discloses the relationship between me and myself, my body and the consciousness of my body - not because the reflection constitutes my unity qua subject, as many psychoanalysts and psychologists apparently believe, but because it transforms what I am into the sign of what I am. This ice-smooth barrier, itself merely an inert sheen, reproduces and displays what I am - in a word, signifies what I am - within an imaginary sphere which is yet quite real. A process of abstraction then - but a fascinating abstraction. In order to know myself, I 'separate myself out from myself’. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space   The flaneur plays the role of scout in the marketplace. As such, he is also the explorer of the crowd. Within the man who abandons himself to it, the crowd inspires a sort of drunkness, one accompanied by very specific illusions: the man flatters himself that, on seeing a passerby swept along by the crowd, he has accurately classified him, seen straight through to the innermost recesses of his soul - all on the basis of external appearance. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project   We rub shoulders with each other everyday, we may not know each other, but we could become friends one day. Wong Kar-wai, Chungking Express 1994   Cruising in HK - From the Gay Guide to Hong Kong Best time after 8.30 p.m and before closing. Pacific Place Shopping Mall, MTR Admiralty The Landmark, MTR Central Ocean Terminal Shopping Centre, 3rd Floor, MTR Tsim Sha Tsui IFC Shopping Mall, Ground floor, 1st floor, MTR Central

The act of picking up somebody in public for sex is by no means circumscribed to gay men, as female prostitution appropriated the space of the shopping arcades since their appearance in the nineteenth-century. In the shopping mall both bodies and commodities become part of the scenographic display: all participate at the same time as forming an audience. A spectacle marked by the exchange of looks and gazes, complements the display of goods. The mirror, prioritizing the visual, the perspectival, in a manner that resembles theatrical space, is the most ubiquitous feature of Hong Kong shopping malls. Even when mirrors are sparsely used, shop windows, polished marble surfaces and stainless steel panels ensure the constant reflection of bodies.   The spatial arrangement of reflecting surfaces allow people to look at each other without embarrassment, looks are mediated, often reflections of reflections, bouncing back and forth. Being looked at can only be perceived in the act of looking at oneself. Voyeurism and narcissism are conflated in a commercial space that thrives on both. The mirror, like the mall, carves out a space floating between inside and outside, reality and unreality. Marketeers are trying to channel the pleasure principle into predictable commercial conduits and thus sublimate desire. Seductive icons of commercialized love appear in shopping windows, mannequins and body parts, usually female, eroticise the merchandise. One can play fictionally with the possibility of possession, take on and discard whole identities associated with objects. Here one can apprehend oneself as one more object in the simulacra of objects. But as kleptomania proves, the fetishistic power exercised by the goods can exceed the economic rationale of commerce. What if desire which should circulate the shoppers around the stationary commodities instead circulates between the shoppers? When attention wavers from rational economic activities, people may take the opportunity to elaborate more complex social behaviors, to engage in more roles, even to contest the rationalized norms of the site. My walking takes on the character of cruising. Dominated by a scopophilic pleasure, this is also a walk of showing off for sexual ends while watching others to assess their looks and whether they are willing to exchange glances and more.

Festival Walk, Kowloon Tong. 24-06-03, 6:30 pm As I take the escalator I notice that several men are leaning against the balustrade on the upper floor, looking down. The counterpoint is provided by the middle-aged man standing next to me, who is looking up. His eyes are fixed on the stainless steel panel hung over the escalator: My cleavage that no frontal view would reveal is reflected overhead, as it is that of the woman who is standing before me.   The word scopophilia is made up of two Greek words, scopos, which is to do with looking and seeing, and philia, which is to do with a love of, or pleasure in, something. Scopophilia is therefore to do with the love of, or the pleasures that are received from, looking and seeing.   Elements of Desire. A Sensory Experience. Explore the Dynamics of Desire Through Pacific Place. Let Inspiration Be Your Guide. Pacific Place, The Place To Be. (Poster Ad) Pacific Place, like an upmarket variation on the theme of the old Parisian arcades, offers the possibility to explore a more carnal type of desire upstairs. Serviced apartments and two hotels can be accessed from the mall by taking an elevator. A recent decision to close male lavatories at 6:30 pm has put a dent on Pacific Place reputation as top cruising spot and pushed cottaging activities to malls where such time restrictions don’t apply.   Contemporary shopping malls implicate the same shadows of self, desire, and consumption amongst the goods on display and the crowds of people. Rob Shields, Lifestyle Shopping   Before the shop window the eyes of the young woman in the black dress meet those reflected in the pane of glass. She turns away slowly to her right and continues to walk with the same regular step. The young woman is wearing a low-cut bodice that leaves the shoulders and the cleavage bare. Tomorrow then, she says. Or the day after tomorrow. Delicate high-heeled sandals, whose leather thongs form three gilt crosses over each tiny foot. A close-fitting dress very slightly striated at each step by tiny creases moving under the hips and belly. Alain Robbe-Grillet, La Maison des Rendez-vous   Neither space nor concepts alone are erotic, but the junction between the two is. Bernard Tschumi, The Pleasure of Architecture

The Flaneuse, regarded as an anomaly in the 19th century 1, feels at home in the 21st century house of mirrors. One could argue that within the disciplinary space of the mall, where the visual mode is dominant, to exercise agency is virtually impossible, that the objectifying character of the male gaze makes the notion of flaneuserie impossible. This argument doesn’t take into account current gender relations and the potential power of the individual who seems to play by the rules (the scopic regime) and yet devises a set of tactics to subvert the space rationale for commerce.   Through the (re)inscription or articulation of sexuality and desire within the order of a dominantly asexual space, cruising performs an appropriation of semi-public spaces. It doesn’t produce a marginal site in which hetero and homosexuality finds a demarcated place, rather cruising is out of place. An ephemeral practice, sometimes visible, but mostly out of sight. It is ghostly and haunting not only because it plays with in/visibility and dis/appearance, but also because it reveals to us desires, and also identities, that have been socially and spatially excluded in the production of commercial semi-public spaces. Cruising implies the existence of blind spots in the structure, backspaces which allow a certain degree of intimacy.   To go 'into the mirror' or 'through the looking glass' implies passing a threshold and entering another world. This other world lies beyond the image. It is 'there' that the principles and archetypal conditions of experience of the world are to be found.   The visceral space The mall is a realm for consumption, effectively forcing the realm of production out of sight. It‘s ‘imagineered’ with maintenance and management techniques, keeping invisible the delivery bays or support systems. The corollary of this quest for purity is the specification for a back region where the subterranean and dirty 'functions' of the shopping center can be hidden. In Mary Douglas’ famous classification of ‘dirt as matter out of place’, the pure establishes itself in opposition to the dirty. That is particularly pertinent to building construction, as it involves drawing and defending borders that hold what is defined and pure. An area which is designated ‘dirty’, literally begins to acquire dirt and collect things out-of-place.		It was Woman that the stores fought over, Woman that they caught up in the continual trap of their sales, after having overwhelmed her with their displays. They had awakened in her flesh new desires, which were an immense temptation, to which she succumbed fatally, giving in first to the small purchases of a good homemaker, then won over by the coquetry, then devoured. Emile Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames   The pleasure principle works through a mesh of decisions which parallel those of the shopper in front of their goods struggling with economic decisions. The libidinal economy is a phrase to be taken literally as well as metaphorically, not that any firm division can be made between the literal and the metaphoric in language anyway. Eric Laurier, City of Glas-z   It is a queer space, an odd space, one that has no particular shape or site, but one that continually slips into the activities of everyday life, transforming them into a fantastical world of possible desire. Aaron Betsky, Building Sex   One knew of places in ancient Greece where the way led down into the underworld. Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld – a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project   Even the most striated city space gives rise to smooth spaces (…) Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus   Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, insofar as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. Where there is dirt there is a system. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger

In the mall the borders between accessible areas and the backstage are not only clearly signposted, they are also delineated by the use of different building materials. Glossy surfaces are replaced by matt or rough ones, marble flooring by cheap tiles. Exposed pipes, water ducts, vents, electricity cables, service stairs, sprinklers are a vision given only to those who push a fire exit door, or follow a toilet sign only to walk past the toilet entrance, into the tapering corridors, and stair system that constitute the backstage. A space of both repulsion and fascination, this soft underbelly like the labyrinthine bowels of Bataille, also functions as a powerful site of the imaginary: the site of the expansion and permeability of bodily boundaries. Erotically charged activities occur spontaneously, grafting onto these under-used, peripheral spaces. Unsurveyed spaces attract behaviours that are either increasingly marginalized, labeled as deviant, or illegal. Yet their existence points to a dialectical movement: prohibition, as power, produces space and space, as prohibition, produces power. Space far from being a passive backdrop looks back and suggests new, unanticipated uses. The backstage becomes the centre stage of a different performance. Behind a fire exit door one can find a spot where to smoke a cigarette undetected by surveillance cameras or security personnel, eat from a lunch box, engage in sex acts, hide stolen goods, exchange illegal substances for money, take an unscheduled break from a cleaning shift, or simply sleep. Defined by its functional marginality this space both produces and caters for needs and desires. It does so by means of differential systems and valorizations which overwhelm the strict location of such needs and desires in specialized places.

IFC shopping mall, 15-10-03 h.6:00 pm On the first floor stairs I catch sight of shop assistants and cleaners lighting cigarettes, chatting, sitting on the stairs while eating out of their lunch box. They are surrounded by discarded packaging material, mops and carts full of cleaning products, toilets rolls and refill bottles for liquid soap dispensers. The Landmark shopping mall, 23-11-03 h.6:45 pm I sneak out for a smoke before a meeting in the building. A young couple (shop assistants?) are making out between the second and third floor. As they spot me, I smile, show them the cigarette as a way of excuse and walk back downstairs.   True eroticism starts and ultimately ends with individual imagination. Sensuous effects can be achieved by blurring the definition of the conventional environment. For space to present an erotic threshold, invariably it has to incorporate a contradiction, in connotation or function. If an intimate incident occurs in a public place, the place itself retains that frisson for those involved. It’s forever constituted by that practice. Space is dynamic and active: assembling, showing, containing, blurring, hiding, defining, separating, territorializing and naming many points of capture for power, identity and meaning. Steve Pile, The Body and The City