Dates: Aug. 29 – Oct. 12, 2017
Venue: TECO-NY Gallery (1 E. 42nd St., 1st and 2nd floors)
Curators: Sharleen YU, LIU Chen-hsiang
Artists/Group: LIU Chen-hsiang│HSU Po-hsin│HUANG Tzu-ming
│The Green Team
Opening: Aug. 29, 6:30-8:00pm
Organized by and first shown as a special section of the exhibition Faint Light, Dark Shadows at Taipei Fine Arts Museum from March to June of this year, History’s Shadows and Light features photographs of major political and social movements in Taiwan from 1986 to 1990—a time when photography not only served witness to society’s drastic transformation immediately before and after the end of martial law in 1987, but also began to expand the expressive force and contagious appeal of the contemporary photographic aesthetic.
This exhibition ponders some of the issues that arose with the lifting of martial law, such as human rights, farmers’ and workers’ movements, and environmental protection, as documented through the lens of several of Taiwan’s most representative photojournalists—Liu Chen-hsiang, Huang Tzu-ming and Hsu Po-hsin, as well as the rarely seen documentary films of the Green Team.
Extracting the idea of processing photographs in a darkroom back in film-camera era, in this exhibition a series of negatives are displayed in the lightboxes, juxtaposed with enlarged black and white prints of selected shots. This demonstrates the creation of picturesque language for individual expressions through various innovative photographic approaches, and discloses the process of photography in Taiwan moving from sheer documentation to today’s contemporary art form.