The Marker: Photography with a cold eye
Chung has always been contemplating the process of civilization and its impact on humanity. His most impressive work has to be The Marker. This series of photographs offers detached observations of bridge piers that are under construction. Seen from the viewpoint of the future, these piers assume an aura comparable to that of the memorials left behind by ancient civilizations. Grand and sacred, they hold their ground upon the earth. Paradoxically, despite their resemblance to timeless memorials that symbolize eternity, Chung’s piers are in fact products that help to accelerate the advance of civilization, as they are built to support all kinds of highways.
The way Chung records Taiwan’s landscapes is worth noticing. Rather than capturing sublime or beautiful views, he exposes these bridge piers to the full gaze of the viewer in a coldly detached manner, in large-format photographs that are at once neutral, objective, serial, repetitive and systematic. This recalls modern Germany’s Düsseldorf School of Photography. The founders of this school, Bernd and Hilla Becher, also employed a ”typology” that distanced itself from the photographer’s subjective emotions in recording apparently unremarkable objects like water towers. However that group of photographs by the Bechers betrays a paradoxical style: although they record the commonplace and neglected architecture of water towers, they do so in an authoritative, trustworthy and dignified way.
Compare this with Chung’s photographic strategies for The Marker. Though his work is reminiscent of the Düsseldorf School, what Chung has captured is not finished architecture but bridge piers that are in the process of being built. The in-betweenness of the unfinished piers also gestures toward the ambiguities inherent in photography itself.
The Marker: Provincial Highway 84, Madou District, Tainan City, 2009.