Born in Tainan, Ko went to studied at the Tokyo Photography Institute, Japan in 1959. He first worked at an advertising agency upon his return, and later founded the first professional photography company, Art Garden Culture, in Taiwan in 1964. In 1967, Ko went to the U.S., later opening a photography company in New York City in 1971, and becoming a contract photographer of a number of fashion magazines. In 1979, he closed his company, and embark on a journey to India, Southern Europe, and Northern Africa, to photograph local natural and cultural landscapes. Through precise photographic techniques, Ko created works of rich layers of light and shadow, brightness and darkness, and textures. Ko also enhanced the expressions of colors through the technique of dye transfer, extracting daily sceneries from images of mindscape that were almost abstract and metaphysical. Ko was praised as the “First Man in Taiwan Modern Photography.” His most representative works include “Wait for Venus” (1979), “Tree & Wall” (1979), and “Golden Sea” (1988), and he won the Wu San-Lien Award in 2000 and National Award for Arts in 2006.

References:

Shen Bo-Cheng. Photographers of Taiwan: Ko Si-Chi, Taipei: National Taiwan Museum, 2017.

Boundaries of Poetry – Ko Si-Chi, Taichung: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2020.

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Hung graduated with a master's degree from the Graduate Institute of New Media Art, National Taiwan University of the Arts. His creative themes focus on the context of new media and the representations of the virtual and reality in topography images. With the experience of his own residential area and long-term observation of various market scenes in Wanhua District, Taipei City, Hung explores his gaze at social cognition and communal flows in civilian spaces, and creates aerial photography, video art, 3D scanning, and VR productions. These creative experiences enables his investigation of virtual reality to take in the sense of place in different dimensions of the local social network.

His exhibition experience includes: solo exhibition On Fluid Street at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and Xiao Long Cultural Park Believers in town at Soulangh Cultural Park; participated in 2020 Nuit Blanche Taipei, Perforated City, The 6th Mediations Biennale, Montaże - Biblioteka, Poland, etc.; won the Next Art Tainan Award, Merit award of the 2019 Kaohsiung Awards-Technology Media Art, Gold Medal Award for New Media Art at the 2018 National Art Exhibition, etc.; works are collected in the Art Bank, and the Yo-Chang Art Museum.

Provided by the Artist

Born in Banqiao, Taiwan, Chang graduated from the Department of Civil Engineering, National Taiwan University in 1965. “Wherever you go, you’re at the scene.” As a high school student, Chang picked up his camera and began to photograph, and he has not stopped since. His images reveal transcendence amidst the commonplace, intimacy amidst alienation, humor amidst the absurd. These works reflect the photographer’s acute observations and earnest understanding as well as his substantial concern and empathy. He once remarked, “Photographers seek less for a vista as for an atmosphere, a state of existence. They could be monumental silence and emptiness, or subtle fantasy and expectation, or perhaps an alternative ineluctable form of energy and excitement”. His career spanning more than 50 years has encompassed photography, television programs, documentary films and dramas. His works not only reflect the pulse of his age, but are also far-reaching witnesses to history. He is the recipient of several major awards, including the Golden Bell (1976), the National Award for Arts (1999) and the National Cultural Award (2011). He has curated exhibitions and taught courses on photography and film. He has organized, edited and written books on Taiwanese photographers and photography. With unflagging dedication he has worked to pass on, build up and promote the legacy of both still photography and motion pictures, guiding the less experienced, making considerable contributions and casting a long shadow in his field.

Reference:

Metadata of the Collection of the National Center of Photography and Images, 2021.

Born in Tainan, Taiwan in 1968, Shen obtained his Master’s degree from the Graduate School of the Applied Media Arts, National Taiwan University of Arts. He worked as a Deputy Chief photographer for the Liberty Times, Taiwan, the artist in residence at National Central University, and currently is the adjunct associate professor at the National Taiwan University of Arts. Aside from photographic creation, he also works on photography commentary, research, curation, and convener of the Photo ONE, Taipei. His major works include Reflections of Nan-Fang-Ao (2001) to the latter series of Yulan: Magnolia Flower (2008), Tsukiji Fish Market (2010), STAGE (2011), SINGERS & STAGES (2013) and Taiwanese Vaudeville Troupes (2016). Shen won the Golden Tripod Award for Best Photography (Magazine Category) of R.O.C. (Taiwan) in 2000, 2002 and 2012, the Asia Award in Sagamihara, Japan (2004), the Dong-Gang Photography Award, Korea (2006), the Artists Wanted: Photography Category Award, NY, USA (2011), the IPA (International Photography Awards) 1st Place in Professional: Book of Documentary, LA, USA (2012), and the 2015 Wu San-Lien Award, Taiwan, among others. In addition to being published in journals home and abroad, Shen’s works have been exhibited in museums and art institutions in the United States, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Peru, Brazil, Guatemala, Argentina, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Cambodia and PRC China.

Reference:

Born in Taichung, Taiwan, Hsieh began painting in 1966, with his artworks awarded on numerous occasions. He moved to Taipei in 1967 and began working in photography and experimental film. Immersed in an era of debates between homeland literature and modern literature, Hsieh continued his visual journey and began working at several media outlets in 1978, where he also took staged photographs for films and worked as a project planner. The experience enriched the way he approached his own visual design and film creation. Hsieh presented his solo exhibition, Homeland in 1988, and worked on and completed the film scripts for Flood, Taipei and NEXEN between the years of 1996 to 2001. In 2003, he completed a collection of poems, entitled The Cave. His solo exhibition Non-Zone Moving in 2002 integrated his art with digital technology and received tremendous feedbacks internationally. His “Le Festin de Chun-Te” was presented during the 2011 Venice Biennale, and he published Slight Touch and held a solo exhibition at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in 2013. TEN KA, the first episode of Hsieh Chun-Te’s mesmerizing art series The Parallel Universe, was presented at the Museum of National Taipei University of Education in 2018. It is a transdisciplinary work that incorporates multiple creative fields such as large-scale digital staged photography, poetry, performance, installation, and cuisine culture. This work not only perpetuates the artist’s consistent thinking of the meaning of life, but also sets out on a more spirit-oriented inner journey with a multidimensional cosmic view. Hsieh is still actively creating photography art today, with his art collected by the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.

Reference:

Born in Chongqing, China and raised in Taiwan, Lee moved to New York, the United States after he received his BFA in Painting from College of Chinese Culture. Then he received his MA degree majored in Photography and Film from Philadelphia College of Art and worked as an Art Director in New York until the late seventies, at which point he changed to photography as a career. Within one and a half decades, he went through different stages from fashion, people to still life collage. Since 1990s, computer technology allowed him to combine his various drawing, photographic and fine art skills in one medium. Lee's work has been shown in exhibitions: Looking Glass—Daniel Lee Retrospective at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2016), NEXT at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2016), Daniel Lee/Metamorphosis in the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shanghai, China (2014), dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany 2012, chosen as the Featured artist by Ars Electronica 2005, Linz, Austria, as well as the 2004 Whitstable Biennale in UK, and 2003 Biennale of Venice.

Reference:

Metadata of the Collection of the National Center of Photography and Images, 2021.

Born in Taipei, Quo moved to Tokyo with his parents at an early age. After graduating from junior high school, Quo entered the Department of Library and Information Science, World College of Journalism (now Shih Hsin University). He purchased his very first camera at 19, and began his creative career in photography. In the 1970s, he joined the V-10 Visual Art Group, and photographed for the Cloud Gate Dance Theater during its early days. In 1975, Quo went to France and studied at the Department of Cinema, University of Paris VIII; he also worked as a commercial photographer, and created photographic works in his free time, using a style of low brightness and high saturation to construct surrealist images from real external landscapes. Quo was engaged in commercial photography in the French fashion industry in the 1980s, and continued to create photographic works. In 1984, Quo won the Wu San-Lien Award. He returned to Taiwan in the 1990s, and is now the art director of a fashion brand.

Reference: Chen Wei-Chien, Photographers of Taiwan: Quo Ying-Sheng, Taichung: National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2019.

Born in Pingtung, Taiwan, Teng began his passion for photography during a family trip when he was in elementary school, as his father handed the camera to him to take his first photo, and praised Teng after processing the work, "you take better pictures than your uncle." The first time he signed up for a photography competition in high school, he won a gold medal, which encouraged him to capture every scene and object in front of him with his camera. Teng currently works in press and teaches photography; at the same time, he is also keen on topics including fashion, documentary, directing, conceptual photography, and creates works on land, people and cities. Creativity of images is his way of communicating with the world, and he regards photography as his second life. He has been engaged in photojournalism for more than 20 years, and has rich experience in capturing incident scenes and figures. He believes that photojournalism enables people to observe quietly, not only conveying social reality, but also the diverse aspects of life through the perspective of the viewer. Since 2007, he has been invited by Dharma Drum Mountain to take photographs for table calendars, recipes, video columns, and so on. In recent years, his series Farewell to the Fox have been published in the column Contrary Scenery in the supplement of the China Times. Other works are widely seen in newspapers, magazines and electronic media. He won the National Photography Competition Collection Award (first prize) of the 2012 Xu Xiaobing Cup, and wrote Farewell to The Fox: Teng Po-jen's Novel, 2020, A Twist of Time, 2016 and Le Temps Perdu, 2011. Among them, Farewell to The Fox: Teng Po-jen's Novel and the Le Temps Perdu series were collected by the Art Bank Taiwan and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. The A Twist of Time series were introduced by Chinese Photography magazine in June 2016. In 2018, he launched and curated the 2018 Kaohsiung Photo, and also served as the convener of the 2018 Taipei Photo Exhibition. He is currently an adjunct assistant professor at the Department of Design, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology.

Provided by the Artist

Chiu holds a master’s degree in Fine Art Photography from the State University of New York. He has focused extensively on the interrelationship between visual development and culture, with his studies and art predominately concentrated on the application and integration of interdisciplinary media, which he uses to explore issues related to Taiwanese society and culture. An example of such endeavor includes his attempt to combine photography with traditional embroidery often used in Taiwanese temple festivities, with the format and the narratives continuously transformed by the artist and exhibited frequently in many places, including at photography festivals in Taipei, Taiwan; Pingyao and Dali, China; expositions in London and Italy, and also solo exhibitions in Japan and Korea, which have all generated much attention.

Reference:

Metadata of the Collection of the National Center of Photography and Images, 2021.

Born in Yilan, Taiwan, Huang currently lives and works in Yilan and Taipei. He holds a Bachelor degree of Fine Arts at National Taiwan University of the Arts, and a Master degree of Fine Arts at National Taipei University of the Arts. He held several solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Artist Village, and so on, and has been invited to participate in international exhibitions such as Hello! Robot. Design between Human and Machine, the five-year international tour exhibition of the Vitra Design Museum in Germany and the Asolo Art Film Festival in Italy. His creativity explores the multiple dialectics of self-cognition and external environment through focusing on the issues of biological and mechanical integration/hybridization.

Provided by the Artist

Born in Changhua, Taiwan in 1959, Huang graduated from the Department of Botany at the Chinese Culture University. Since 1983, he has been engaged in the creativity of modern art and his works have been selected for various modern art exhibitions in Taiwan. He also held several solo exhibitions. In 1988, he co-founded "IT PARK－ Modern Art Space" with Chuang Pu and others. In 1995, he established the ET@T (ETAT), a new media art experimental institution. In 2000, together with Gu Shi-Yong, Chang Ci-Fu and Wang Fu-Rui, Huang established ETAT Lab, continued to carry out artistic explorations as well as technical research and development of interactive installations, and jointly published a number of new media artworks such as [T]Art and Yellow Submarine. He had served as the executive director of the Association of Culture Environment Reform, the director of the Society of Contemporary Art, the exhibition coordinator of the curatorial team of the NAVIGATOR- Digital Art in the Making, 2004, and the co-curator of the B!AS- International Sound Art Exhibition, 2005. Since 2006, he has organized the "Taipei Digital Arts Festival" and established the preparatory office of the Digital Arts Center, Taipei. Since 2008, he has served as the chairman of the Digital Art Foundation. In 2009, he served as the CEO of Digital Arts Center, Taipei and established the ETAT Media Theater to produce and promote digital art performances. He has incubated and facilitated a number of technology-oriented cultural and creative teams, and currently operates the Digital Art Foundation as well as dedicated to exploring creative thinking in the technological society.

Provided by the Artist

Born in Tainan in 1986, Liao is a much-acclaimed Taiwanese video artist. She graduated from the Graduate lnstitute of Arts and Technology, National Taipei University of the Arts, and has been shortlisted for Taipei Art Awards many times. She won the first prize for Video Art in the 5th Taipei Digital Art Awards in 2010, and the grand prize of the 7th Taipei Digital Art Award in 2012. Liao uses video art as the main creative medium, focusing on body experience, memory and emotion, exploring different levels of sensations in life through open narrative, and delicately depicting the shared moments between people. She has won the Special Jury Award of the UNITEXT Kaunas Biennale in Lithuania, and has been invited to participate in international exhibitions such as the Videonale in Bonn, Germany. Her solo exhibitions in 2021 include Way Out Beyond (Taipei Museum of Fine Arts), River Still, River Goes (VT Art Salon, Taipei), and Sanssouci Park (a.m. space, Hong Kong).

Provided by the Artist

Born in Busan, Korea, Ho is an alumnus of the Department of Philosophy at the National Chengchi University. He worked as a photojournalist for the CommonWealth Magazine, China Times Weekly, Minsheng Daily News, Independence Morning, and Evening Posts, China Times News Weekly, Commercial Times, and as the director of photography for Playboy Chinese Edition, the editorial-chief of photography for Smart Monthly, the director of photography for UBN Weekly, and the deputy editor of Mingpao Weekly. Ho is currently responsible for the operations at Ho Chuang Image Studio.

Ho specializes in observed portraits. The three series by him, Industrial Injury, Shadowed Life, and The File of White Terror, all use images to speak, shout, and denounce on behalf of underprivileged, marginalized people in Taiwan. The selected subject matters, presentation approaches, efforts devoted into the artworks all originate from the photographer’s profound concern and recognition for people.

Reference:

Metadata of the Collection of the National Center of Photography and Images, 2021.

Born in Fongbitou, Siaogang in 1960, Hung is known for being a true amateur artist with his blue collar background. His passion for photography as well as for local Siaogang culture has brought him to plenty of photography communities. The pure, distant and quiet tones that come from his indifference to fame and fortune have become an exclusive signature in his artwork. Hung’s inspirations mainly come from the Hongmaogang Village Resettlement, from which he explores the villagers’ anxiety toward the change and the future. He combines photographs and sculpture to generate a series of social changes and rhythms to echo the villagers’ uncertainty. His work portrays the contradictions and bafflements of the people who are suffering from political mistakes, natural disasters and social injustices and how this resettlement erased and abandoned the history of the village. Also revealed in his artwork is the mourning of villagers as everything is gone and nothing is left behind. A lot of memories have been forgotten, but Hung will continue using his camera and photographs to document the stories of Hongmaogang villagers.

Reference:

Metadata of the Collection of the National Center of Photography and Images, 2021.

Born in Yongjing Township, Changhua County in 1952, Wang graduated from the Provincial Yeong-Jing Industrial Vocational High School. Visiting the Kucapungane tribe for the first time in 1991, he started his career that spans more than 25 years in documenting the Rukai with image and texts. Staged in 2015, his solo exhibition Life & Soul, the Way Back Home was nominated for the 14th Taishin Art Award. Published collaboratively by the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts and the Lion Art in 2016, his photographic book Sabau! Haucha — Wang Yu-pang: Image Speaking Rukai was included in the recommended reading by the 41st Golden Tripod Awards. His documentary photography is not only of great significance for the conservation and research of the cultures of Taiwanese indigenous peoples, but also powerfully expressive and aesthetically pleasing in terms of artistic presentation.

Reference:

Metadata of the Collection of the National Center of Photography and Images, 2021.