Resembling a dream sequence staged in a London conference centre, a corporate environment filled with clouds so dense they formed a kind of artificial weather system indoors. London Vape Expo took place in February 2020, just months before the Covid-19 forced the world into lockdown. It was less an industry expo than a performance of excess, where the act of inhaling and exhaling became the centrepiece of a strange, self-contained spectacle. All this unfolded just weeks before the pandemic would recast such gatherings as inconceivable, making the scene look even more absurd in hindsight.

 At the time, the world of vaping still felt strangely handcrafted and theatrical, more like a traveling sideshow than a consumer marketplace. Tables were cluttered with glass tanks, coils, and tools that resembled a jeweller’s bench, while backdrops of graffiti fonts and neon signage made every exhibitor feel like a fragment of a subcultural dreamscape. At the time, vaping hadn’t yet been absorbed by the tidal wave of disposable products that dominated the landscape. Instead, it was a strangely insular and subcultural world, with its own rituals, language, and aesthetics that never fully broke into the mainstream. This underground community, half DIY hobbyists and half would-be futurists, existed for a fleeting moment between the rise of single-use convenience. Looking back, the vape at he time, and its culture feel like a surreal artefact of a very narrow window in history—an object and obsession suspended between pre-pandemic innocence and the disposable culture that quickly eclipsed it. The absurdity isn’t just in the act itself but in how quickly it became a relic of a time that feels both recent and impossibly distant, the sculptural quality of temporary man-made clouds, and the fetishist quality of the objects making them. 

 The entire scene had the aura of a temporary world built inside a capitalist hellscape, a fogged-in microcosm that could only exist for a brief moment in time. Looking back, it feels less like an industry gathering and more like a mirage—an image suspended between pre-pandemic innocence and a looming collapse, a fleeting cash-grab that birthed a surreal and visual subcultural entity.