Taiwan Today

An exhibition is spotlighting the evolution of Taiwan’s visual art scene over the past 40 years.

April 2021 saw the opening of the National Center of Photography and Images—Taiwan’s first such center dedicated to visual art—in Taipei City. In addition to preserving and restoring culturally significant photographic work and advancing research in image-based art, one of the center’s missions is to promote  homegrown artists. 

A recent exhibition titled “Specularity/Reflexivity: Contemporary Image Arts after 1980s” showcases the development of Taiwan’s visual art over the past four decades. While some of the works are “specularities,” resembling a mirror that documents people and landscapes, others are “reflexivities,” examining the artists’ own feelings, reactions and motives beyond the images.

Among the 23 photographers showcased in the exhibition, Huang Chien-Hua (黃建樺) manipulates digital images to prompt viewers to consider the relationships between people, animals and the environment, like in his 2006 work “Beasts: Rhinoceros,” which depicts a rhinoceros lying in an MRT car. By contrast, Wu Cheng-Chang (吳政璋) uses more traditional photographic techniques such as overexposure to diminish the clarity of human figures in landscapes, as in his 2011 piece “Vision of Taiwan: T-bar and Rice Field.” For him, this symbolizes people’s disengagement from and lack of relationship with the natural environment.

From old fashioned film cameras to state-of-the-art digital ones, this exhibition shows how Taiwan visual artists have explored both landscapes and identity through imagery.

—by Jim Hwang