Memento Mori and Ancestral Portraits: The Future
The photographer Tou Yun-fei has an abiding interest in portraiture. His Memento Mori was a widely known series of photographs that captured the looks of stray dogs before they were euthanized. It marked a stylistic shift toward images exuding an austere coldness. Using a quasi-documentary approach, Tou recorded the dogs’ dignified solemnity shortly before they died. In other words, he did not merely produce sentimental portraits invested with human sympathies. Rather, through photography, he perpetuated the transient expressions of living beings facing imminent death.
Tou’s new body of work, Ancestral Portraits: The Future, focuses on second-generation immigrants. The series tackles the complex ramifications of Taiwanese identity in a highly globalized context, but it also presages that a hundred years from now, these mixed-blood children of immigrants will be remembered as ancestors of future Taiwanese people. On the face of it, Tou is recording the various looks of immigrants’ children in the here and now, but in fact he is also creating remarkably elaborate “funeral portraits,” well in advance of his subjects’ deaths. These photographs, when passed down, will help future generations think about the issues with which we are confronted today. Tou’s work responds to the family perpetuation and survival of second-generation immigrants (and future Taiwanese people), as if considering, from a more vital perspective, how perceptions of what it means to be “Taiwanese” will change with time.
Zhang Yujing, Taichung City, 2018
