NATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND IMAGES-Past Exhibitions

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Stories of Our Scenery

2021-08-26 ~ 2022-01-02

Taipei National Center of Photography and Images

Banner（1516 x 1012 px）-2_21122717142183950

Curator(s)

Exhibiting Artist(s)

Supervisor

Ministry of Culture

Organizer

National Taiwan Museum of Arts, National Center of Photography and Images

Exhibition Overview

Taiwan is surrounded by the sea on all sides, with mountains comprising 70 percent of the island’s total area. Colonizers from different regimes ruled Taiwan for over a century as they vied to control the island’s resources of mountains and seas. The interpretation of images was never the right of the island’s inhabitants. When John Thomson followed Dr. James Laidlaw Maxwell ashore at Takao Harbor in early April 1871, he photographed his impressions of the “Isla Formosa” in one short week. This is a journey of the West looking at the East; from then on, the island’s mountains, forests, and seas no longer belonged to the island’s people. For various interests and reasons of control, the colonists who arrived with the Kuroshio Current began restricting access to mountains and the seas.

Along with the landscape imagery and composite photography that arrived with Chinese culture after the Pacific War, local photographers inheriting the Japanese style of landscape portraiture pieced together an image of the island from various aspects through the vocabulary of others. The rise of photojournalism following a burgeoning Taiwanese consciousness around the lifting of the martial law in the 1970s, saw photographers more intent than ever to seek out scenic vistas among the island’s mountains and seas. The emergence of “Taiwanology'' in the 1990s, along with a newly returned group of students who studied photography abroad, gave rise to new ideas on methods of interpretation and narration through images. Trends in topographic photography in the new millennium provided landscape photography in Taiwan with a new direction. Photographers use their own two feet to determine their position from which to read the story within a landscape. Through a series of interconnected decisions such as choosing a focal point within the frame of the viewfinder, and the moment to press the shutter, they captured, using mechanical and optical technology, moments that were enduring and everlasting, yet unique at every turn.

In developing the thematic context of this exhibition, each artist has taken Taiwan’s geographical and humanistic phenomenon as a main axis as they undertake long-term field observation and practice photography. Yang Shun-Fa extends his Taiwan To Go series with Ocean Theater: The photographer points his camera lens toward the expansive intertidal zone; a dialectical relationship among a familiar yet strange ocean, the sandbar, and the islanders is played out within the image. Hsu Cheng-Tang has walked the length of Zhuoshui River over the years, photographing its upstream, midstream, downstream, and the estuary. In the Zhuoshui River Project, he carries his camera on a trek along the Sakuma Pass, Wujie Tribal territory, Jiji Weir, to the estuary near his hometown of Taixi Village. The poet of images chants a song of unbearable anxieties, whilethe ostensibly romantic images are branded with the reporter’s two-lined poem. In the tale of the island’s scenery, Lee Hsu-Pin follows the migration trail of the Bunun tribe from two thousand years ago, or the footsteps of German naturalist Karl Theodor Stöpel and the five Bunun natives at Christmas in 1899, from the intertidal zone up the Zhuoshui River, the Chenyoulan River, and the Tongpurui River, then scaling the main peak of Mt. Jade. For his work The Scenery Enroute: Recurring Returns, Lee Hsu-Pin carries a large-format film camera that Stöpel was unable to take to the summit of the main peak. He then follows naturalist and anthropologist Tadao Kano’s sight lines as he makes his way along the tourist trails developed by the colonists, crossing the path of the highlanders of the island nation, conjuring the captured spirits of the big island before finally stopping at an impassable broken bridge and collapsed cliff-face. Liang Ting-Yu traces the Stone Gods of the valley in search of the frontlines of the battle for resources, and explores the beheaded ghosts that wander among the tribal villages and Han towns. Through these intersecting perspectives, Liang depicts the overlapping historical memories and the heterogeneous flow of landscapes on their shifting borderlands. And through the eyes of pigeons, Lee Li-Chung’s Tieguoshan erects a path that traverses the mountains and seas at the shipping office in the building of the NCPI and while overlooking Tieguoshan in the history of Yunlin County from various dimensions. What remains constant on this path of seeing stories is not the scenery, but the temporal-spatial strata that the storytellers traverse.

Exhibition Themes

LEE Hsu-Pin | The Scenery Enroute: Recurring Returns
LEE Hsu-Pin | The Scenery Enroute: Recurring Returns
The majority of Lee Hsu-Pin’s early works comprises warm sepia-toned black-and-white photographs that depict scenes of restoration in the aftermath of disasters. The content of his images often stand in dramatic contrast with their textures. His recent practice focuses on the symbiosis between images and texts, with works photographed using a traditional large format film camera and accompanied by his own non-fictional writings. The work, The Scenery Enroute: Recurring Returns, in the current exhibition, has been developed as an extension of a photographic survey conducted on Mount Niitaka (Mt. Jade) in 2019. Tracing the records documenting the first ascent of Mt. Jade’s main peak and eastern peak, Lee walks into the mountain trails of history, using images generated by mechanical devices to produce image fossils of particular moments; and using texts to describe his experience of traversing and flowing through time and space. He explores the temporal-spatial environments recorded in the narratives of the event from the perspectives of geographical phenomena, of the colonizers, and of external and indigenous ethnic groups. In addition to black-and-white images, the exhibition also includes a simple, printed travelogue that describes the journeys of ascending the main peak and eastern peak of Mt. Jade, and of seeking out the source of Zhuoshui River. Unlike scenic documentation made by avid mountaineers, Lee is informed by his background in civil engineering as he overlays writings from different eras and perspectives to propose an observation report on the “scenery” he encounters first-hand.
HSU Cheng-Tang | Zhuoshui River Project
HSU Cheng-Tang | Zhuoshui River Project
The main thrust of Hsu Cheng-Tang’s practice centers environmental and geological issues. While continuing the tradition of Taiwanese photojournalism, his image style is unique in the visual depiction of scenic objects and landscapes. He has participated in a number of interdisciplinary projects in recent years, such as When the South Wind Blows—The Documentary Photography of Taixi Village in 2014 in collaboration with the National Museum of Natural Science; Between Tectonic Plates: Geoparks in Taiwan published in collaboration with the Central Geological Survey (Ministry of Economic Affairs) and geological experts in 2016; and A Smoking Island: Petrochemical Industry, Our Dangerous Companion more than Fifty Years in 2018, written in collaboration with a number of text and image practitioners. The work currently on view are highlights from Hsu’s long-term Zhuoshui River Project. Born in Taixi Village at the estuary of the Zhuoshui River, Hsu has documented various human-intrusions into the landscape over time. The perspective of his images may be ostensibly objective, but a powerful reference is enveloped in the beautiful scenes seen through his camera lens. The works in this exhibition break free from the tradition of photojournalism that emphasizes the character-time-event structure. Texts and images are given equal emphasis in the 18 photograph and text pairings that describe predicaments in the human struggle to coexist with nature along the upstream, midstream and downstream of the Zhuoshui River, as well as the countless scars and wounds endured by the river in the process of industrial development.
Yang Shun-Fa | Taiwan To Go— A Tribute to Stone Lee & Ocean Theater
Yang Shun-Fa | Taiwan To Go— A Tribute to Stone Lee & Ocean Theater
There is admirable passion and persistence in Yang Shun-Fa’s attitude as a blue-collar artist. He has had awe-inspiring developments at each stage of his career: he drastically transformed from practicing salon photography to developing his distinctive style in Rebuilding the Kingdom. Especially after the 2004 series Home and Rootless on the theme of Hong Mao Harbor, he gradually established the main direction in his practice with social consciousness and care. This exhibition features ten images selected from the Taiwan To Go and Ocean Theater series developed as parts of his recent Island Project. Walking in an expansive intertidal zone, Yang turns his camera lens to Taiwanese native dogs foraging for food on the sandbar, and on fishermen working in the sea. To him, this corporeal gesture and action are a collective symbol for the people on this island nation, as well as a constant dialectical process among the sea, the sandbar, and the islanders. Ocean Theater captures fishermen raking for wild clams along the alluvial fans of the estuary. This is a final gift to the islanders from the Mother River before she flows into the sea. Yang uses his camera in the sea to capture his vision of an ocean characteristic specific to the Taiwanese while also contemplating where the Taiwanese native dogs must wander when they reach the end of the sandbar.
LIANG Ting-Yu | Death Valley
LIANG Ting-Yu | Death Valley
The artists in this exhibition come from a variety of backgrounds: from civil engineering, electro-mechanics, steelworks, to design. Artist Liang Ting-Yu reverses the trend by crossing from art into the realms of cultural history, geology, and animism through his sensate artistic practice. His works are often presented in various and interdisciplinary forms including exhibitions, lecture forums, essays, and public screenings. While the aim of most artistic fieldworks is to seek the boundaries of stories and crevices in the narratives, rather than to produce academic papers, Laing’s essays, which collect and analyze the differences among the viewpoints and thinkings around various ethnic groups, are byproducts generated from the process of the artist organizing his research topics. Liang’s work in the exhibition, Death Valley, delves into ghost stories that cannot be “produced” by traditional fieldwork through methods of oral narratives and field investigation. The artist combines high chroma colors with negative image effects to make visible the hidden stories. In the vein of the pathways, historical spaces, shifting borders, and intersecting perspectives, and the visualization of intangible subjects embodied in his works creates a contrasting reference to works by other artists in the exhibition.
LEE Li-Chung | Tieguoshan
LEE Li-Chung | Tieguoshan
Lee Li-Chung’s early photographic works comprise mainly snapshots which went through a thorough process of editing to create dialogues on wall spaces. There was a clear transformation in his style subsequent to his 2015 work, Space Out; and his 2016 project Longing for Your Return opened up new vistas in his practice, and re-established his relationship with pigeons. Following The Battle of Mt. Zhugao and Red Feet Ling and The Memo of Formosa Air Battle, Lee has once again found gaps in the silenced history, using pigeons as protagonists in his narratives to develop Tieguoshan. Pigeons carrying positioning systems are placed in unnoticed events in history to bear witness; at the same time, pigeons also become the vehicles for Lee’s travel through time and space. In the midst of narratives that cannot ultimately change the past, a dotted line of divergent history is drawn by the entrancing and fascinating flightpath of the pigeons. Pigeons navigate by determining a direction and then taking flight according to landmarks along the way; the pigeons’ flightpath in Tieguoshan roughly follows the Zhuoshui River from midstream to downstream. In this work, Lee does not present figurative landscapes, but this dotted flightpath in the corridors of the NCPI. It is a mission as well as a way home.