Publication day
2025.07
ISBN
978-626-395-212-6
Chief Editor
FENG Sheng-Hsuan
Contributors
Raphaële BERTHO, Hubert KILIAN
In France and Taiwan alike, the ideals of modernity are crumbling under the strain of climate change. The vision of a world with boundless resources, perpetual growth, and human mastery over nature is no longer sustainable. Today, we find ourselves at the edge of this collapsing modern paradigm, searching for equilibrium. This is the narrative that photographers explore in this exhibition: a society clinging to obsolete utopias while confronting the raw power of living ecosystems.
The philosophical and moral warning against an excessive attachment to possessions, as represented by the original vanities, transforms into a photographic meditation. This meditation explores ways of inhabiting a world facing imminent collapse. This tension between geological and climatic realities and human presence on Earth finds expression in the landscape genre. The landscape is no longer just Umgebung—the surrounding environment—but truly Umwelt, the human environment, “our shared existence.” This is the heart of the exhibition’s purpose: to build a community of perspectives by bringing together artists who live and work at opposite ends of the world, in very different economic, geopolitical, cultural, and social contexts. Despite this distance, a common viewpoint unites the photographers: their work compels us to confront the roots of the ongoing ecological disaster, the founding vanity, the myth of humanity’s domination over a submissive nature.
The images reveal this turning point in all its complexity, blending the visible with the invisible, facts with imagination. The photographic medium frees itself from mere surface, pushing its boundaries and challenging how we see. Landscapes become subjective expressions—sometimes incomplete, always evolving—shaped by the people who inhabit and create them. The arrogance that fueled the rise of modernity is as evident here as its consequences; photography becomes the tool that uncovers the invisible foundations upon which our fragile realities are built.