“Heart-image photography” is a distinctive way to compose photographic narratives by expressing feelings through scenes and conveying meanings with objects. Using scenes and objects in still lifes, the photographer extracts the signs of difference embedded in the images to derive multiple meanings. This photographic approach, posited between figurative and abstract expressions, replaces realism with lyricism to visualize the photographer's subjective emotions. It is a photographic style uniquely developed in the Taiwanese photographic world.
In Lee Ti-Chin's heart-image photography, he took pictures of reality through a subjective point of view, complemented by visual vocabularies such as plastic form, light and shadow, color, and line. He created his own framing of scenes and produces the idiosyncratic atmosphere that permeates the images. Through this approach, he expressed his feelings evoked and echoed by the scenes. The photographer's state of mind is thereby projected towards the spectator through his pictures, and the spectator can follow potential traces in the images to further dig into and perceive them. Consequently, the interpretive space of the photographic works can continue to expand through imagination.