Stories Developing: 10 Contemporary Photographers of Taiwan

DURATION: 2011-01-30 ~ 2011-04-10
OPENING: 2011-02-04
VENUE: Galleries 104~105, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts
ADDRESS: 80 Meishuguan Road, Gushan District, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan

As one of the three major exhibitions of the 2010 “Hong Kong Photo Festival,” the “Four Dimensions—Contemporary Photography from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan & Macau” highlights the development of contemporary photography in these four regions. Thanks to the generous support of Chou Ching-hui, the curator for Taiwan region, we are able to feature the works of the participating Taiwanese photographers at our museum. Our attempt is to present to local viewers the achievements of these photographers who have attracted international attention, as well as the vigorous diversity of Taiwan’s contemporary photography, which underlines documentary representation, image capturing, creativity, form, etc. About the Exhibition Thanks to its development and its simultaneous attributes of immediacy and delay, photography has given people a means of overcoming the physical restrictions on visual perception, and achieving boundless extension of the field of vision. Beyond changing people`s visual habits, photography`s powerful influence has also spread to their inner consciousness, and altered their thinking and conceptions. As a result, apart from its original documentary function, photography has also become a highly expressive medium for engaging in artistic creativity. The use of photography as an artistic medium already has a long history as a thread in the development of contemporary art, and the art of photography has achieved a position of considerable visibility and importance. With the development of digital images, photographic technology has advanced even more, and photographic equipment has become better and more available. As a consequence, the art of photography has developed innovative new expressive methods and forms, undergone fusion with other media, expanded into new domains, and inspired people to reconsider and re-imagine the artistic possibilities of "seeing." Held at the end of 2010, the magnificent Hong Kong Photo Festival was a major cultural activity, and revealed the epochal significance of photography. The Festival`s flagship exhibition Four Dimensions—Contemporary Photography from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan & Macau was held at the Hong Kong Arts Centre; this exhibition came 16 years after the milestone 1994 Contemporary Photography from Mainland China, Hong Kong & Taiwan. The various regions of Asia have undergone rapid development at different times during the past two decades, and the politics, economies, and societies of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau have gone through spectacular transformations. These four regions have also affected each other`s development in many subtle ways, and their evolution has unquestionably had an enormous influence on the development of the art of photography. As a consequence, this exhibition of contemporary photographs from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau provides a superb platform allowing the participants to present and share the development of photography in their respective regions during recent decades. The exhibition also enables observers to see how much creative energy photography has absorbed since the groundbreaking Contemporary Photography from Mainland China, Hong Kong & Taiwan of 16 years ago. In the words of Chou Ching-hui, curator of the exhibition`s Taiwan area: "At that time, the recent lifting of martial law in Taiwan had been followed by a tremendous explosion of the country`s grassroots energies, which resulted in a major stimulus to documentary photography. As a result, most of the works from Taiwan at the 1994 exhibition were documentary photographs. Furthermore, a majority of the participating artists worked in the media, and were consequently professional photographers. Sixteen years later, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau have undergone immense cultural, economic, and political changes, and photography has become an indispensable form of art. Due to changing values and the advance of technology, today`s Taiwanese works have much greater aesthetic diversity, and the participants are no longer mostly professional photographers, but rather artists in actuality." This museum`s motivation for holding the Stories Developing exhibition is thus our wish to shift the focus from the contemporary photographs of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau to Taiwan`s photographic artists. We hope that the work of these ten artists spanning different periods of time, and their distinctive methods and subjects, will reveal some of the unique stylistic forms that have emerged in contemporary Taiwanese photography over the past decade or more, and develop some images of stories of Taiwan. These artists grew up in Taiwan and live in Taiwan; their experiences and impressions therefore can all be developed into stories of Taiwan. The emotionally-laden tales these artists wish to tell, and the abstract situations they wish to express, are recreated as images on viewers` retinas via the works` special techniques of presentation, and then developed in viewers’ minds, such as CHUNG Shun-lung`s Civilized Landscape – The Marker series and CHEN Po-i`s Outlook series, which portray the human environment of the everyday world as surreal uninhabited landscapes, and tell tales of social transformation and homesickness; The works of LIN Yu-tin and CHEN Wan-ling, which dissect concrete elements from the perspective of their indescribable individual feelings, and thereby express tales of loving households and roaming in time/space; YAO Jui-chung`s Liberating Taiwan series and The World Is for All—China Beyond China, which transform the political stage into a game table, and bring to mind certain ridiculous scenes in human political history; CHEN Shun-chu`s Distance in Memory series, which uses out of focus documentary photos and transparent gel in natural forms to evoke fragments of distant memories and relate stories copied from memory in a poetic manner; CHOU Ching-hui`s Wild Aspirations – The Yellow Sheep River Project series and WU Tien-chang`s Shock‧Shot series, which develop the action of photograph taking into the act of image creating, and, through the artists` clever manipulations, transform portrait photographs into creation of the imagination, and thus produce stories about captured dreams and trembling souls; Lulu Shur-tzy HOU`s Look toward the Other Side: Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan series, which consists of a “mutual conversion” between photographer and the photographed, and uses a "mutual gaze" to convey the story of foreign brides; and CHEN Chieh-jen`s video works The Route and Factory, which employ theatrical scenes and steady frames consisting of interwoven dramatic sets, panoramas, and close-ups to get to the heart of issues, and wordlessly and deeply tell tales of power imbalances.