The Salon of Unfinished Selves - Lucky Plaza

The Salon of Unfinished Selves: A Philosophical Meditation on Lucky Plaza

In the half-shadowed tonality of the photograph, we encounter not a depiction but a disturbance. What unfolds inside this Lucky Plaza salon is less a scene than an event of appearing: an emergence of bodies engaged in gestures both intimate and anonymous, suspended between presence and deferral. The image refuses to be approached as mere representation; rather, it invites contemplation of that which eludes representation—the surplus, the remainder, the trace.

At its centre stands a mirror, but it offers no stable ground. Mirrors usually promise a return: the face comes back to itself, the world verifies its own existence. Yet here, the mirror becomes a site of displacement. The reflected woman is neither entirely present nor entirely absent. Her face—half-returned, half-withheld—reveals the philosophical rupture at the heart of self-recognition:

I see myself, but I am never identical to what I see.

This ontological gap echoes Derrida’s insistence that any presence is always accompanied by its own shadow of non-presence. The mirror in the photograph becomes a metaphor for the diaspora itself: one belongs, but never entirely; one reflects home, but from an elsewhere; one is anchored yet drifting. To be “here” is always to be “not fully here.”

Around this mirror, a constellation of gestures unfolds. The hands of the hairdressers glide with practised precision, yet their craft is never fully theirs. Each motion carries the history of countless repetitions—teachers never shown, apprentices never seen—echoing Derrida’s notion that every action bears the trace of other actions, other origins, other absent presences. The scissors cut, but what they cut is never simply hair; they cut through layers of identity, memory, and the quiet labour that sustains distant families and distant homes.

And what of the woman in the background, absorbed in her phone? Her gesture appears mundane, almost invisible, yet it opens the deepest philosophical wound in the image. Her attention is elsewhere—across oceans, across borders, across time zones. The phone functions as the supplement in Derrida’s sense: an addition that compensates for the absence of what cannot be present, a prosthetic for a homeland that remains unreachable. Her bowed head becomes the silent centre of the image’s metaphysics of exile.

The salon itself—filled with tools, chemicals, sprays, mirrors—embodies an ontology of impermanence. Everything here is temporary. The colouring fades. The cut grows out. The styling collapses. Identity is crafted, uncrafted, and crafted again. Nothing stabilises. Everything is in process. This is the deep truth the photograph brings into focus:

identity is not something one has, but something one continually tends to—an unfinished work, a perpetual negotiation.

Lucky Plaza is often spoken of as a hub of community, a marketplace, a gathering point. But the photograph reveals another layer: it is a threshold where selves are maintained in the face of distance, where labour becomes a form of care, where the mundane rituals of grooming become acts of quiet defiance against loneliness and displacement. The salon is neither home nor foreign; it is a liminal zone in which identities are temporarily held together by fragile gestures.

The philosophical power of the photograph lies in the tension between what is shown and what is withheld. Every figure is both present and partially obscured. Every gesture is both intimate and anonymous. Every reflection is incomplete. This incompleteness is not a flaw—it is the very condition of the diaspora’s existence.

The Filipino women and men of Lucky Plaza constitute a community built not on stable foundations but on traces: fragments of home, fragments of memory, fragments of self carried across borders. The photograph captures this precarious cohesion—this stitching together of lives that must remain open to unravelling.

In its stillness, the image whispers a truth both gentle and unsettling:

we do not live in identities; we live in the spaces between them.

This salon, with its mirrored fractures and tactile rituals, becomes a philosophical site where the human condition reveals itself—not as unity, but as a field of shifting relations, a dance of partial presences, a play of reflections that never fully align.

The photograph is thus neither documentation nor narrative. It is an invitation to dwell with the fragility of being, with the quiet ache of distance, with the perpetual incompletion that defines the migrant, the worker, the self. In this way, the camera has not captured Lucky Plaza; it have exposed the trembling architecture of existence itself.