DÉJÀ VU: The Uncanny Recall
- Evan Lai
- Jun 22
- 4 min read
Imagining that a conversation currently taking place has happened before. Walking into a room you have never been in and feeling a sense of familiarity. Or even traveling to a completely new country and believing you’ve experienced a very similar scenario. These are all examples of how déjà vu influences us in our daily lives. Déjà vu, a French loanword meaning ‘seen before’, is the phenomenon of feeling as though one has previously experienced a highly similar situation to the one at present. It is a feeling of familiarity in unfamiliarity, using familiar stimuli or objects in a novel environment, triggering our false memory into recollection. Many artists incorporate elusive everyday substances in their works to evoke déjà vu, rendering even simple, mundane snapshots of life uncanny.
DRAWING DÉJÀ VU

Edward Hopper’s Morning Sun interrogates modern alienation through its austere yet luminous formalism. The central figure—a woman seated on a bed, her body angled toward the window—fixes her gaze upon the urban vista, her right eye rendered vacantly sightless, a haunting sign of existential disconnection. The coldness of the unadorned wall, the rigid orthogonal lines of the architecture against the raking morning light, amplifies this sense of alienation. The repetition of window within window, frame within frame further creates a mise-en-abyme of recursive familiarity. Notably, Hopper’s treatment of illumination transcends mere naturalism; it becomes an almost Caravaggesque tenebroso of modernity, where light does not clarify but estranges, carving the figure out of shadow to underscore her ontological solitude. Ochres bleed into chalky neutrals, flesh tones subdued to near-translucence, evoking a chromatic liminality and imbuing the scene with a sense of temporal suspension. This familiar setting of a bedroom, reconstructed in such an uncanny, surreal perspective is a clear embodiment of déjà vu to depict the ineffable melancholia of 20th-century urbanity; the subject looks internally in her personal search for meaning within the mundane moments of life.

The Human Condition by Rene Magritte (1933) (Image from renemagritte.org/the-human-condition.jsp)
René Magritte’s The Human Condition is another subversion of artistic tradition that challenges perception and interrogation. At first glance, the piece seems to depict an ordinary, everyday snapshot; it is an open-curtain window view of a natural landscape. Yet, a seamless canvas subtly materialises, well-blended into the background. Like the Old Masters, Magritte employs trompe-l’oeil, the realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface, exposing the surreality of the artifice of painting itself where she merges an almost seamless canvas into the background scenery, creating a visual paradox. Is the painting an accurate reflection of reality, or a self-contained illusion? This sleight of hand underscores Magritte’s belief that reality is a construct of the mind. By obscuring the ‘true’ view with his painted facsimile, he forces the viewer to confront the limitations of vision: we see only what we are shown, yet our imagination compulsively fills the gaps. The work becomes a meta-commentary on artistic deception—the ‘incognito artist’ renders every detail with hyperrealist precision, yet the true scene, hidden behind the canvas remains an enigma of what we think we know and what we actually see. The painting becomes a metaphor for consciousness itself: her reality is always déjà vu, almost familiar, yet forever just out of reach.

Patricia Piccinini’s The Young Family elicits an unsettling sense of déjà vu by presenting a scene that feels at once intimately familiar yet grotesquely alien. At first glance, the sculpture appears to depict a banal scene: a mother nurturing her young. Yet on closer inspection, the figures morph into a chimeric hybrid, neither fully human nor animal, but an uncanny fusion of both. Like a cognitive glitch, looking at this work feels like we’ve encountered this creature before in a half-remembered nightmare or a speculative future. Exploiting our primal recognition of maternal care while subverting it, this work forces us to confront our reflexive reactions, eliciting déjà vu through the clash of empathy and revulsion. Piccinini’s use of hyperrealistic materials (silicone, human hair, leather) further heightens this déjà vu effect, displaying the grotesque viscerally tactile. The mother’s thoughtful expression and tender posture evoke universal empathy, yet her pig-like snout and wrinkled flesh destabilize this image, mirroring the way déjà vu distorts familiarity. By anthropomorphizing the genetically modified, Piccinini mirrors déjà vu’s psychological paradox: the simultaneous recognition and alienation of a future we’ve already imagined but fear to confront. The work asks whether our empathy can stretch to encompass beings engineered by science, or if our revulsion reveals deeper biases. Like déjà vu, The Young Family lingers in the liminal space between memory and prophecy, challenging us to reconcile humanity’s relentless advancement with its ethical echoes.
IS TRUE NOVELTY POSSIBLE?
If everything unfamiliar can produce a familiar effect given the inherently interconnected qualities of things, does it make everything new we see, just an iteration of what we saw in the past? Philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche posited that all existence recurs infinitely in an identical cycle. If true, then every ‘new’ moment is a repetition of the past, making déjà vu a fleeting glimpse into a cyclical, cosmic repetition. The novelty in déjà vu can also be seen as a ‘reshuffling’ of existing entities. The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges is a perfect manifestation of this: the essence of this library is that it is infinite and contains all possible configurations of the characters in a language. There is a profound implication that anything ‘new’ you read or write, is simply a discovery of something that has already existed; there may be no such thing as an invention but a reconstruction of anything existing in the cosmos. In the same sense, everything ‘new’ you draw, is simply a discovery of how certain colours, lines, and shapes come together to form a combination. When it comes to the act of painting, or writing, or many other things in life, is everything new you experience just a reiteration, a ‘shuffling’ of what came before you? Is everything a déjà vu?
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