With realistic techniques and artistic ingenuity, Lin’s depiction of rural life embodies his warm humanistic concern and the pastoral beauty of Taiwan.
Photographer Chang Chao-tang has written an article on Lin Chuan-tsu’s pastoral themes. He believes, “Lin Chuan-tsu recorded these moments of waiting, expressing a photographer’s ardent aspirations for life and memories.... With simple composition, subtle framing, vivid subject, ingenious aura, characters and scenes in Lin’s works convey the natural, rural flavor and rhythm in stillness and dynamics. The image journal of Lin Chuan-tsu is a brief history and a poem of the laborious life of the Taiwanese residents. Humor, concern, and respect are also naturally revealed in his work.” Chang has given positive comments toward the composition, framing, artistic conception, the attitude of the artist to the object captured and the expression of subjective emotions in Lin’s works.
Children and cattle are constant themes of Lin Chuan-tsu’s works as family farming is a symbol and characteristic of Taiwan’s agricultural society at that time. In Three Boys on the Buffalos, the flourishing bamboo forest on the right side of the image slightly covers the path where the figures and the buffalos come from, creating a composition of contrasting density as well as light and dark. The sunlight shines through bamboo leaves, falling on the backs of figures and the buffalos while the children talk and laugh, creating a casual and warm atmosphere.
Sun Wei-xuan, “2021 Compilation and Research Project of Metadata in Photography.”