A new photographic language
Exhibitions at art museums tend to be more academic in nature and broader in scope, while smaller privately run exhibitions generally lean toward more creative approaches. Nearly a decade ago, photographer Lee Hsu-pin chose Tainan, known for its artistic and cultural side, to be home to the “Fotoaura Institute of Photography.” Since then, Fotoaura has hosted several significant events in photographic culture.
Confronted with photography’s inherent ability to capture scenes and atmospheres and its inability to clearly describe the nature of events, Lee has striven in his curation of exhibitions to go beyond the ontological limits of photography by mixing in other media, including video and installation art, to help draw out the inner world of the photographers and the hidden meaning within their images.
In recent years, solo exhibitions by Lin Bo-liang and Wang Yu-pang have been held to rave receptions, as Lee enthusiastically recounts.
“Every photographer has his own unique story and starting point,” says Lee. For example, Lin Bo-liang, who in his youth was taught by Shiy De-jinn, was an important player in Taiwanese photography, and captured images of major literary figures like Chou Meng-tieh, Yeh Shih-tao, and Qi Dengsheng. However, before this solo exhibition, he had lain silent for some two decades.
To help bring people to an understanding of the meaning of Lin Bo-liang’s portraits, Lee made use of methods including video and audio to assist Lin in telling their stories. He also designed a handbook for the exhibition which came in a five-by-seven-inch metal photo-paper box. It included reproductions of postcards sent between Lin and Shiy De-jinn, newspaper and magazine cuttings, and a “preface” written by Lee in the guise of a letter from himself to Lin. The handbook was a kind of primer for the show, while the exhibition itself was almost a biography of the photographer.
That small solo exhibition was such a great success that it attracted the attention of the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, resulting in both an invitation to move the exhibition there and the reinvigoration of Lin’s reputation.
Wang Yu-pang, meanwhile, comes from quite a different background. For the past 24 years, this self-taught photographer has made the abandoned Rukai village of Kucapungane (known as Haocha in Chinese) in Pingtung County his subject, recording the process of its people’s rebuilding of the trail to their old home after the trail was destroyed by storms and landslides. Lee Hsu-pin used painting to reproduce the rising and falling contours of the old trail on the exhibition walls, with the photos displayed in their actual geographical locations. “Walking through the exhibition is then like walking their ‘trip home’ yourself,” remarks Lee.
These creative ideas have won no shortage of recognition, including positive reviews from the judges of the Taishin Art Awards, who noted how the exhibition broke free of the usual aesthetic constraints of genre, transforming the experience for visitors into one of getting involved with documents and clues. This exhibition also landed an invite from the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines and another from the NTMoFA. The Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts was so taken with it that, in an unprecedented move, they were eager to discuss the possibility of acquiring both the photographs and the exhibition design for their collection.
The Fotoaura Institute of Photography hosted a solo exhibition by Lu Yu-jui entitled “Squid Jigger Vessel,” with the frames of the photos designed like portholes, recreating the photographer’s time at sea.
