Shun-Fa Yang Copyright © and all rights reserved
Yang was raised in a farming family in Tainan. He knew of the harsh conditions of the land and what it takes to strive in such environment. After military service, he entered China Steel Corporation and has been working there ever since. CSC’s photo club was where he learned photography and delved into the world of image making. For over 30 years, he has produced dozens of projects, many of which have been exhibited at major institutions and festivals worldwide, including Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Grand Palais, Paris, Kosovo Biennale, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Lishui Photography Festival, and CO4 Taiwan Avant-Garde Documenta.
Yang’s artistic approach evolved from the early pictorial style, to a more subjective expression, then to staged photography and digital image manipulations. In recent years, he is committed to documenting and representing his beloved island of Taiwan. The Island Project was conceived under this goal in 2014, and has been Yang Shun-Fa’s ongoing endeavor to this day. The Island Project includes four parts: Homage to Chen Ting-Shih (2014-15), The Submerged Beauty of Formosa (2014-21), The Submerged Beauty of Formosa: Defending the Nation, the Land (2017), Taiwan To-Go (2018), and Ocean Theater (2019-).
Email: ysf3397@yahoo.com.tw
Taiwan Shiu-mo 台灣「水沒」
Shiuhhuah Serena Chou 周序樺
Shun-fa Yang's “The Submerged Beauty of Formosa” features a series of over sixty landscape photographs of Taiwan’s “shiu-mo” taken since 2016. A blue-collar photographer from Kaohsiung, Yang notes, “shiu-mo first suggests a ‘sinking and flooded’ (水沒) Taiwan, but it also refers to a unique Taiwanese intervention into the Chinese “ink painting” tradition, shiu-mo hua (水墨畫).” In the tradition of an aesthetic genre that celebrates the inner harmony of the human and nonhuman, Yang insists on capturing the serenity of Taiwan, an island so luscious and pristine that it was named by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century as “Ilha Formosa.” This sense of beauty, however, is given a twist when he redefines nature from a landscape of unspoiled wildness absent of humans to a wasteland abandoned by humans because of overdevelopment. Highlighting the beauty of Taiwan’s flooded coastlines, he asks not only what catastrophes cause the disappearance of humans but, more importantly, whether nature, as Laozi says in Tao Te Ching, is indifferent because even environmental disasters could also be sweepingly beautiful. With the question, is Taiwan “beautiful or not” (suí-bô,「嫷」沒, Taiwanese dialect), Yang prompts us to reconsider the meanings of disaster and environmental protection.
嘉義縣東石鄉網寮村
台南市南區四鯤鯓塭
嘉義縣新塭鹽場槍樓(二)
嘉義縣東石鄉鰲鼓村魚塭(三)
彰化伸港鄉海寮
嘉義縣東石鄉鰲鼓村魚塭(一)
嘉義縣布袋鹽場掌潭場務所
嘉義縣東石鄉白水湖漁塭(二)
