There is admirable passion and persistence in Yang Shun-Fa’s attitude as a blue-collar artist. He has had awe-inspiring developments at each stage of his career: he drastically transformed from practicing salon photography to developing his distinctive style in Rebuilding the Kingdom. Especially after the 2004 series Home and Rootless on the theme of Hong Mao Harbor, he gradually established the main direction in his practice with social consciousness and care.

This exhibition features ten images selected from the Taiwan To Go and Ocean Theater series developed as parts of his recent Island Project.  Walking in an expansive intertidal zone, Yang turns his camera lens to Taiwanese native dogs foraging for food on the sandbar, and on fishermen working in the sea. To him, this corporeal gesture and action are a collective symbol for the people on this island nation, as well as a constant dialectical process among the sea, the sandbar, and the islanders.

Ocean Theater captures fishermen raking for wild clams along the alluvial fans of the estuary. This is a final gift to the islanders from the Mother River before she flows into the sea. Yang uses his camera in the sea to capture his vision of an ocean characteristic specific to the Taiwanese while also contemplating where the Taiwanese native dogs must wander when they reach the end of the sandbar.