AsianInNY’s friend Jeff Liao’s work is being installed at the Bryant Park, 42nd Street station (B,D,F, 7).  That is a gorgeous panoramic view of the number 7 train as it winds its way through Queens. Go check it out and see yourself!

7 X 7: Views Along the 7 Line

Photographer Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao has focused his camera on the communities found along the 7 Line, which runs through several ethnic neighborhoods in Queens before arriving in mid-town Manhattan. The images seen at 42nd Street/Bryant Park, a 7 line transfer station, are a panoramic view which uses all seven lightbox frames to create a single sweeping vista, looking west with the train visible in the far left. The images were part of the artist’s Habitat 7 series, and each was shot with a large format camera over the course of several hours. Other examples from Habitat 7 are included in the collection of the George Eastman House, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the J. Getty Museum.

Jeff Liao grew up in Taiwan and moved to Canada to attend high school. He relocated to his current home of New York City to complete his undergraduate degree at Pratt and receive his MFA at the School of Visual Arts. Liao is well-known for his large-scale panoramic photos that capture magnificent details of the urban and social environment of New York City.

Liao’s first major and best known project is his Habitat 7 series, which won the first ever New York Times Magazine “Capture the Times” photography contest in 2005. In this project, Liao shot with a large format camera to create large-scale, color panoramic images of the ethnic communities that have grown around the IRT 7 train in Queens, New York. Using multiple exposures created in the same location and taken over the course of several hours, Liao constructed a compelling project that transcends the limits of documentary photography. This series reveals Liao’s intensely personal journey through the borough of Queens, evident in the diverse range of subjectivities throughout his photographs. The Queens Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of Habitat 7 for six months during the spring and summer of 2006. Examples from Habitat 7 are included in the collection of the George Eastman House, the Harvard Business School, and the Getty Museum. Nazraeli Press published a large scale monograph with text by Anne Tucker in the fall of 2006, and they plan to publish a second monograph on Liao’s Depth of Fields stadium project this year. The series documents the evolution of an ordinary parking lot in Queens into Citi Field, the new home of the Mets.

For more info: http://www.mta.info