Wong Kar-wai and the Sincerity of Solitude
In 1990s Istanbul, whatever time I had left after university was often spent at art festivals, film screenings, exhibitions, concerts, and cultural events. I went to as many as I possibly could. I was surrounded by extraordinarily intelligent, curious people who seemed to know something about everything. Together, we watched, listened to, discussed—and discovered.
The world reached us differently then.
Before the internet turned everything into an endlessly filtered stream, we encountered the world through artists themselves: through films, paintings, music, books, and people who had actually come from somewhere else. We were not simply consuming images of other cultures. We were looking at the world through the eyes of those who had lived it.
That was how I encountered Wong Kar-wai.
It was my friends—many of them devoted Wong Kar-wai admirers—who introduced me to his films. I remember being struck not simply by their beauty, but by their emotional intensity. His characters seemed to carry their loneliness quietly, almost physically. Desire, memory, missed connections, waiting, time passing—nothing was explained away. Everything remained suspended, unresolved, deeply human.
For a while, through someone else's eyes, I had found a witness to my own inner solitude.
This is one of the things I still return to in Wong Kar-wai's cinema. His films do not seem interested in making human beings more convenient, more understandable, or more marketable. They allow people to remain contradictory, vulnerable, private and beautifully unfinished.
As a painter, I am drawn to this deeply. Painting, too, can be an attempt to stay with a human being long enough to see what lies beneath the surface—not the image we present to the world, but the emotional life that exists behind it.
We live in a time when almost everything is made more polished, but mediocre, more visible but shallow—and increasingly more commercial. Art is often asked to perform, to sell, to build an identity, to become content.
In such a world, how sincere can one really be in portraying the solitude of a human being?
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