A rare polymath, Chung Soon-long has long been dedic­ated to photography. He is a photographer, but also a picture framer; he is both a hard-working farmer based in Hualien’s Fenglin Township, and a devoted husband who regu­larly travels to Nantou’s Puli Township. These diverse roles have permeated Chung’s photographic practice, which draws inspiration from the way he perceives every moment of his life as a farmer, as well as from all the time he spends commuting on the Central Cross-Island Highway. His new series of photographs, Transition, elucidates the perceptions gained from the interplay of his various roles, exploring the vexed relationships between ends and processes, civilization and nature, the mind and the external world, and other binaries.

The Marker: National Highway 6, Puli Township, Nantou County, 2007.

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.

Transition: A dialectic between mind and matter

If The Marker presents civilization in an objective and rational manner, Chung’s new project Transition is more introspective in that it explores the photographer’s present frame of mind, even while continuing to brood on civilization. Through Chung’s composition of images, for example, rather than merely highlighting the neutral­ity of the objects portrayed, Transition presents many scenes that are shrouded in mists, giving them a more poetic mood. At the same time, these mists reflect the photo­grapher’s mindscape, reminding us of his perception of seasonal changes in his farming life, and this seasonal and meteorological flux is also directly depicted in Trans­ition. On the other hand, the project does not neglect to comment on civilization. Many of the photographs are of scenes that carry human traces. They seem to show pristine nature but are in fact manmade scenes, their artificiality being part of the process of civilization.

Transition inevitably brings to mind the Western tradi­tion of road photography, which usually throws into relief a free and aimless on-the-road individualism. While Chung’s work shares some formal similarities with road photography, however, it does not foreground a liberated individual expressing himself on the road. Rather, it portrays his travels between Fenglin and Puli, which are necessary in order to maintain family ties. That is to say, the Central Cross-Island Highway embodies those repetit­ive daily routines that are vital to marital relation­ships; it does not bespeak the process—enshrined in Western road photography—of exploring the unknown world “out there.”

Transition: Serpentine

Images of in-betweenness

It seems as if Chung enjoys himself during his long journeys on the cross-island highway, where he also probes his own state of mind. If most of his time on the road is dominated by the intention of getting back home quickly, Transition explores what lies “between” his point of departure and his destination. In the slow process of taking photo­graphs with his large-format camera, he shakes off his original sense of purpose, no longer aiming to rush back home. While he is capturing scenes that are rarely noticed by people “in transit,” he interacts with the highway in the here and now, withstanding the relentless pressure of time.

From The Marker to Transition, we see Chung Soon-long’s ceaseless efforts to contemplate the “in-betweenness” of objects through photography. These efforts also respond to the ambiguous nature of photography per se. Importantly, the liminal state he seeks, which resists immediate clarification, does not open a window on attractive landscapes; nor does it resemble reportage with clearly defined purposes. Instead, it helps us reflect on the process of human civilization and invites us to imagine a philosophy of life that facilitates our coexisting with nature in the here and now.

Transition: Surface

Transition: Spots of Light