"Almost Drowning: Lin Zhipeng｜No. 223
Text／Curator｜Andy Yen

There are many things in life that stay with us most vividly not after they have actually happened, but just before they almost do.

Almost sinking.
Almost losing balance.
Almost running out of breath.
Almost getting too close.
Almost leaving, and almost beginning again.

Every day, we rush for trains, go to work, reply to messages, and face all kinds of invisible expectations. We move back and forth within relationships that feel either too close or too distant. Sometimes nothing truly serious has happened, yet the body seems to know before we do: a sudden tightness in the chest, a shortening of breath, the sensation of slowly sinking beneath the surface.

The photographs of No. 223 have long been filled with intimate bodies, disordered rooms, desire, revelry, and a raw, visceral sense of being alive. This time, however, we draw out another, less frequently noticed thread from the vast body of images he has accumulated over the years: those moments when bodies arrive at an edge, while what is happening has not yet reached completion.

Someone floats in water; someone sinks into a bathtub. Someone collapses onto a bed; bodies become entangled. A bouquet is burning, fruit is scattered around the body, shadows fall across skin, and faces are obscured by water, light, or another body. Very few people in these photographs are actually drowning. And yet the sensation of almost drowning is everywhere.

“Almost” does not simply mean that something has failed to be completed.

If we borrow Catherine Fowler’s discussion of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of potentiality, potentiality does not simply refer to a future that has not yet happened. Rather, it describes a capacity that already exists but does not necessarily have to be realized. It contains both the possibility that something can happen and that it can also not happen.“Almost,” then, is not a state of incompleteness, but one in which other possibilities remain open.

Almost sinking does not merely mean that drowning has failed to occur; it also means that the body may still rise to the surface. Almost leaving does not simply mean that departure has failed; it means that a relationship may still move in another direction. Nothing has yet been closed off. Things can still become otherwise. Photography is particularly capable of preserving such a state.

Once the shutter is released, an event that should have continued to unfold is interrupted. The water does not continue to rise, the fire does not continue to burn, the body never completes its fall, and intimacy is not pushed toward any definitive conclusion.Everything remains suspended at a point where nothing has yet been decided.

Another concept discussed by Catherine Fowler is stillness.Stillness is not simply the absence of movement. On the contrary, it can become a condition that extends the duration of looking. When an image does not rush to tell us what happens next, the viewer is given time to look longer
and more carefully. Change, therefore, does not necessarily occur only within the image; it may also take place through the act of viewing. Photography itself is an interruption of time. At the instant the shutter is pressed, something already in motion is removed from its original temporal flow. No. 223’s photographs therefore often capture neither the climax of an event nor its outcome, but rather a condition in which something is taking shape without yet being complete.

The “unfinished” is not simply a missing piece of narrative outside the photograph. It becomes part of the image itself. This state of being “not yet decided” also exists in the 35mm film that No. 223 has long used in his practice. Unlike digital photography, which displays its result almost immediately, film records an image at the moment the shutter is pressed, yet the image has not truly been seen. It must wait to be processed and developed, waiting for light, color, grain, and accidental traces to slowly emerge. The act of photographing is complete. The image, however, remains unknown.

In No. 223’s photography, “almost” therefore exists not only within the bodies being photographed, but within photography itself. At the moment the shutter is pressed, one thing has already happened while another remains unfinished.

The image exists somewhere between exposure and development. Like the bodies that float, fall, embrace, or close their eyes, it retains a possibility that has not yet been determined. What the photograph preserves, then, is not only what has happened. It also preserves what might still have happened, but ultimately did not. Yet the ambiguity of photography does not arise only from the interruption of time. It also comes from the fact that certain things never fully reveal themselves.

Catherine Fowler uses the concept of obscurity to discuss how an image may, on the one hand, guide us toward things that are difficult to perceive and, on the other, conceal what we assume ought to be visible. Something remains present. Yet it is never completely revealed. No. 223’s photographs frequently hold our gaze in precisely this position. They rarely tell us exactly “what happened.” A face may be covered by water, cut apart by light, or obscured by another body. An action has no clear beginning and no certain consequence. Even the emotion itself may remain unresolved. Danger and calm can therefore coexist. Intimacy may, in the next moment, become suffocating closeness. Relaxation may approach weightlessness. What remains after revelry may be emptiness—or perhaps merely a brief period of quiet.

The longer we look at one of these photographs, the less certain we may become about what we are actually seeing. Is this person resting, or sinking? Is this an embrace, or a form of pressure? Is this the looseness that follows climax, or the blankness just before consciousness disappears? Photography does not resolve these questions for us. It simply leaves the moment there. And precisely because the image never fully explains itself, looking can continue.

Almost Drowning is therefore not concerned with “drowning” itself, but with those moments before an outcome appears—moments that remain suspended and unresolved. Photography does not merely preserve what has already happened. It also preserves what remains unfinished, what may still move in another direction. We often understand life as a sequence of completed events: meeting, falling in love, separating, succeeding, failing, losing. Yet much of the time, we actually live within unfinished moments. We do not know what will happen next, nor do we know what the things we are experiencing now will eventually come to mean.

“Almost,” then, is not a failed outcome. It is a moment that has not yet been closed. It is not a lack of possibility. It is the persistence of possibility. In these images, the body has not completely sunk, and so it may still rise to the surface. A relationship has not yet reached its end, and so it may still change. The last breath has not been exhausted, and so breathing continues.

When the photograph holds these moments still, we, the viewers standing before it—become newly conscious of our own breathing. Looking becomes a small exchange: the image has stopped, but possibility has not. The image keeps time suspended at the point of “almost,” while we, standing before it, continue to breathe. Almost Drowning is not an exhibition about suffering, nor is it an exhibition about healing. It is closer to an attempt to look at those moments in life that have not yet been decided. Those moments when we almost sink, but have not yet sunk. Those moments when things can still become something else. "