This series of images is a type of mise en abyme that evokes a time tunnel. It arose from a question I posed to myself 20 years ago: “I love children, but why am I so afraid of becoming a mother?”

For many female artists, motherhood is synonymous with the termination of their creative careers. After I became pregnant in 2000, fears of being subjugated to a lifetime of maternal selflessness—compounded with vexatious aches and pains and then overwhelming childcare duties—began to chip away at my subjectivity, something that is vital to every artist. I realized, to my alarm, that this was not a physical or psychological problem peculiar to myself. Rather, it was a restraint imposed upon mothers by our social conventions throughout history. At first I ­cravenly turned to escapism, retreating overseas or into my own private sphere and cutting down on public engagements. It was through art that I eventually discovered that it was possible for mothers to preserve their selfhood.

The first photograph in The Mother As a Creator series is a self-portrait taken in 2001, on the day before I was due to give birth. The rest of the photographs were taken in subsequent years whenever my son and I had experienced something memorable together. Each of these shows the two of us in front of the photograph that precedes it in the series. So with the passage of time, various versions of us—at different stages of life, with different looks—are gathered into each new photograph. Different images of us from various temporal contexts—in settings co-created by ourselves—are squeezed into a curious space. They engage in dialogues with each other and furnish a complex, detailed, and vibrant record of our lives.

In performing my maternal duties, I found that mothers, like artists, are full of creative wisdom. Not only have mothers created lives, but they also continue to create diverse experiences that shape their relationships with their children. Dr. Lu Hsiao-yu, who specializes in women’s and gender studies, remarks that mothers’ creative work not only documents life and chronicles their children’s growth but also witnesses the alchemical power of art in transforming stereotypes and clichés: onerous duties are thus turned into a unique kind of artistic practice.

The Mother As a Creator confidently proclaims that mothers, in addition to being capable of preserving their selfhood at the same time as they perform their duties, are able to use their creativity to overturn established myths about motherhood. In 2020 I combined The Mother as a Creator with another series of photographs—My Son and I at the Same Height—and published them as Reframing Motherhood, my first photo­book. Readers can leaf through this fanfold book page by page or unfold it entirely and enjoy the distinctive sense of time that pervades the images, as if this were a real gallery. Reframing Motherhood provides a home for both motherhood and creative practice.