A dialectic between reality and idealization
The Submerged Beauty of Formosa draws on an unobtrusive and graceful style. The viewer immediately perceives a mood of elegance and delicacy. However, the atmosphere evoked by this series of photographs is only a means to attract visual attention. More important are the environmental issues lurking behind those dreamy contours: tidal flooding, land subsidence and overexploitation.
Reportage photographers who focus on land subsidence are likely to seek to represent catastrophes through such approaches as a documentary style, realism and pathos. On the other hand, salon photographers would tend to utilize a more aestheticized style to soften the rough edges of reality, decontextualizing the postcard landscapes they want to capture. Interestingly, Yang has created a dialectic between these two contrasting styles—“realism” and “idealization”—which are brought together in The Submerged Beauty of Formosa. Viewers are immediately charmed by the overarching aesthetic form, but at the same time they are baffled by the details of those real buildings that stand in the midst of water (such as an earth god temple, pillboxes and other military structures, salt company residences, huts by a fishpond, and ordinary houses). This in turn invites them to contemplate the urgent issues of land subsidence and tidal flooding.
The Submerged Beauty of Formosa presents its images by means of a quiet aesthetic evocative of ink-wash painting, using vast landscapes to set off the small buildings in the foregrounds, and cropping the photographs into an oval format. Furthermore, Yang is not like Shen Chao-liang, Wu Cheng-chang and other photographers who seek to record Taiwan’s magnificent landscapes. Rather, he creates digitally composited landscapes that are based on reality but not themselves real. That is to say, The Submerged Beauty of Formosa is more like a fusion of painting and photography. Rather than being direct representations of existing landscapes, Yang’s photographs reconstruct real scenes through fictionalization, restructuring and synthesis. In so doing, they encourage viewers to engage with them imaginatively.