Taiwan Today

From his studio in a hilly area of Tamsui, north of Taipei City, Ko Si-chi (柯錫杰), 84, talks with enthusiasm about a career spanning 50 years and his major works, including his latest collection titled Eden. Shot in Australia in 2011, the relatively new work is a collection of photos of non-professional nude models in nature, including a family of four and a mother and daughter. “After seeing my works online, the models responded to an ad I posted on my Facebook page recruiting people for the photography project,” the photographer says. “They modeled for me and expected nothing in return except copies of the photos.”

Eden became part of Never Seen Before of Ko Si-chi, a book of previously unpublished works Ko released in December 2012. “These non-professional models are so physically different from the young professional models I shot in New York, but for me they’re all representations of beauty … The world of Eden is my utopia, where people are all equal and dare to pursue their dreams and take up challenges regardless of their sex or age,” he says in the preface to the book.

As a recipient of the 2006 National Award for Arts in photography, the highest such honor in Taiwan, Ko has made quite a name for himself as he pursues his own photography dreams. He is known for unique “visionary landscapes” that offer an ethereal image of nature and are capable of capturing “the beauty of the world’s myriad things from a detached perspective,” says Beatrice Hsieh (謝佩霓), director of the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA) in southern Taiwan.

Yet behind Ko’s landscapes, there is the artist’s concern for people, the national award judges commented. Hsiao Chong-ray (蕭瓊瑞), an art historian at National Cheng Kung University in Tainan, southern Taiwan, says Ko’s experiences in his youth definitely had a strong influence on the photographer’s growth into an artist who expresses such concerns through his works.

Ko was born into a well-to-do family in Tainan in 1929. His first major setback in life came when he was 12, with the loss of the family’s fortune. The death of his mother followed soon after. The family’s ancestral house was razed to ground three years later when the US Air Force bombed Taiwan, which was then under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), during World War II. Five years after the Japanese withdrew from Taiwan, Ko joined the Nationalist army, only to find he could not adapt to life in the barracks and ended up deserting for one-and-a-half years before turning himself in. He was 26 by the time he finished serving a jail sentence for desertion and completed the remainder of his military service.

Such a background helped the young man develop into a mature artist with great compassion for the unfortunate and insight into life, Hsiao says. For the art historian, Ko’s image Blind Mother (1962) epitomizes this concern for people’s suffering. Shot in Tainan, the photo depicts a blind begger on the street cradling her child in her lap. It was part of Ko’s first solo exhibition, which was held in Kaohsiung after his return from Japan, where he studied photography for several years.

Without a doubt, Ko took his first big steps as a photographer in Kaohsiung. He studied at a vocational school in the city and after graduation found his first job there at the Taiwan Alkaline Co. At 19, he received his first camera as a gift from a Japanese colleague and developed an interest in photography as a hobby. In 1961, Ko co-founded the Kaohsiung Photography Society with some 20 lovers of the art form including then-Mayor Chen Chi-chuan (陳啟川). The society is still quite active today. Given the significance of the port city to Ko’s career, a major retrospective of his work was aptly launched by KMFA in 2012, half a century after the photographer’s first solo show.

The 1962 solo show attracted Taipei-based art critic Ku Hsien-liang (顧獻樑), who strongly recommended that Ko travel north to Taiwan’s capital to develop his chosen art form. After moving to Taipei, Ko befriended other artists including Huang Chung-liang (黃忠良), who is often credited with introducing modern dance to Taiwan. Ko shot photos of performances by Huang’s dance troupe first indoors and then outdoors at a number of locations in northern Taiwan. Shooting a dance group outdoors was unprecedented, Hsiao says, and the result was quite extraordinary. “Ko built a dialogue between the performers’ dance moves and what nature holds—sky, clouds, trees and rocks. The consequent effect is just stunning,” he says.

Influenced by his friendship with Huang, a longtime resident of the United States, the photographer moved to that country in 1967, finally settling in New York City. He continued to broaden his artistic horizons by attending events and working with other creative people such as Alvin Ailey, the founder of the prestigious Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Norman Mailer, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction and non-fiction. For Ailey, Ko shot the dance troupe in rehearsal, while Mailer invited him to take stills of the movie Maid Stone (1970), which the American novelist wrote, directed and starred in. “Ko interacted with artists from various fields, which no doubt benefited his career as a top photographer,” KMFA’s Hsieh says.

During the 1970s, Ko rose to prominence as a commercial photographer in New York, with commissions rolling in from famous fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, House Beautiful and Essence as well as numerous modeling agencies. “Top artists like Ko usually have experience in commercial photography, through which their names are widely known,” Hsieh notes. “Also, Ko’s commercial works were actually not so ‘commercial,’ as commercial photography at the time retained much more serious artistic values than it does today.”

Life in New York was far from fulfilling for Ko, however, as his desire to pursue pure art was unabated. In 1979 the photographer closed his New York studio and set off alone on an eight-month journey to southern Europe and northern Africa, where he produced a great number of the outstanding landscape photographs that consolidated his reputation as an artist. From Spain, Don Quixote is Gone (1979) portrays windmills against an expanse of blue sky. In Tunisia Ko created A Passenger (1979), an image of the desert environment that has been a favorite setting for the photographer and one that appears in a number of other photos taken on the Silk Road and in Death Valley in California. Presence of Venus (1979), which was taken in Greece, captures the blue Mediterranean Sea, whitewashed wall of a traditional house and shuttered red window. In 2000, Presence of Venus—widely acclaimed as Ko’s signature work—fetched the highest price at the first auction of photographic works in Taiwan by international auction house Christie’s.

“Most of these works are quite mellow in color and extremely simple in composition. You feel Ko expresses his thoughts and emotions in a role somewhere between a poet and philosopher,” Hsiao says. The art historian says Ko’s travels in 1979 were of great significance because it was then that the photographer truly established his personal style.

Pivotal Role

“His works produced during this nomadic period have been celebrated for their pivotal role in championing modernist photography,” writes well-known American photographer Steve McCurry in the preface to Never Seen Before. Ko helped Chinese people appreciate the medium as fine art, writes McCurry, who is best known for his work Afghan Girl in National Geographic magazine. McCurry says the Taiwanese photographer embraces “the camera as his vehicle of self-discovery.”

Meeting and then marrying dancer and choreographer Jessie Fan (樊潔兮) in 1985 was another milestone in Ko’s life and career. Together they flew to Dunhuang, in Gansu province, mainland China, so that Fan could study Dunhuang dance, an art form based on murals found in caves in the region, and interact with mainland Chinese experts in Dunhuang dance. On the couple’s trips to western China, Ko also seized the opportunity to shoot photos in the region, many of them featuring landscapes on the Silk Road and Buddhism. “Ko gave me valuable advice in the process of creating my own dance style,” says Fan, now a top Dunhuang-style dancer. “After seeing my performances, many art critics said that I was a living artwork created by him.”

In 1993 the couple founded Ko and Dancers in Taipei, a dance troupe that has since performed in Egypt, India and Japan, and relocated to Taiwan from New York City the following year. Around the same time, Ko began to contribute to Taiwan’s image abroad. In 1992, the government used four of his photographs for advertisements in international publications. The following year, with Fan as the model, Ko produced The Butterfly, an image seen globally as part of an ad suggesting Taiwan’s transformation in political, economic, cultural and environmental aspects.

Already well-known for his portraits of people in Taiwan’s arts and literature circles, Ko shot another series of such photos in the mid-1990s. This time the photos included Long Chin-san (郎靜山, 1892–1995), a famous photographer born in mainland China who moved to Taiwan in 1949; native Taiwanese sculptor Yuyu Yang (楊英風, 1926–1997); and mainland Chinese-born Gao Xingjian (高行健), the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 2000 and the first Chinese-language writer to do so. An exhibition of Ko’s portraits titled Behind the Scenes—Portrait Exhibition was staged around Taiwan throughout 2003 and was the largest exhibition of portrait photography seen in Taiwan at the time.

In Global Wanderdust (1997), a biography of Ko published by the Commonwealth Publishing Co., the artist says that by the 1990s, many of his friends thought his focus had shifted from making art to exhibiting it. He has never really put away his camera, however, continuing to use the tool to record touching and poetic moments. In 2002, for example, Ko was commissioned by Taipei’s Baoan Temple to capture the beauty of the historic site, as well as folk performances there, an assignment that took months and turned into one of the artist’s major photographic projects. The following year, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum held a special exhibition of Ko’s images from the temple project.

In 2005, Cercle d’Art, a famous French publishing company, commissioned photography critic Hervé Le Goff to produce the photographic album Ko Si Chi, which the artist says was an important factor in his receiving the National Award for Arts in 2006. “Ko has won so much recognition abroad because of the universality of his works,” Hsieh says. “You like his photos not because they are shot in a specific place that is recognizable to you, but because the artist captures details from a unique angle that is seemingly trivial or insignificant, rather than the more recognizable whole thing. He sees what other people do not see.” The artistic value of Ko’s works also sets him apart from photographers who rely on high-quality equipment to produce good-looking photos. “Cameras can be quite sophisticated today, but can all that gear result in an image that touches people’s hearts?” Hsieh asks.

In recent years the artist has continued his search for beauty through the camera lens. Throughout much of 2011 and again in the first half of 2012, Ko, at 82, made frequent trips to Tainan’s Taijiang National Park to shoot an album of photographs commissioned by the park administration. In breaks during the Taijiang project, he traveled to Australia to shoot the Eden series. During his excursion Down Under, Fan expressed concern about her octogenarian husband venturing into the wilderness to capture images of his utopian world. “Although I’m 82, I’m only 28 when I’m out with my camera … No need to worry,” Ko replied. It seems that the photographer will continue impressing viewers with his unique landscapes, as well as with his passion for art.

Write to Oscar Chung at mhchung@mofa.gov.tw