Flowing begins with “Transition,” attending to the ways we continually change through our relationships with others.
Each encounter is like a ripple on water. It meets another wave, shifts, and spreads. Over time, it becomes difficult to tell which encounter first gave rise to the shape before us.
Through repeated developing and bleaching, the image is eroded, retained, and formed again. The original figure never fully disappears, and the new form never becomes entirely stable.
We believe we are becoming ourselves, yet it is difficult to see how many people have changed us.
Research Statement
Flowing begins with “Transition,” exploring how an individual is continually reshaped through time and relationships.
We often understand growth as a process of gradually becoming ourselves. Yet the self is never formed independently. Family, friendship, intimacy, and the brief or accidental encounters of a life can all quietly enter into the ways we understand who we are. Accumulated over time, these influences make the self a continually emergent state rather than something fixed and complete.
“Flowing” therefore becomes the work’s central metaphor. Ripples on water meet, shift, and overlap. Each contact changes an existing form while carrying new movement outward. When one ripple encounters another, influence no longer has a clear source or boundary; what we see is only a temporary form produced through countless interactions.
The making of the images follows a similar structure. Through repeated developing and bleaching, the original image is eroded, weakened, retained, and regenerated upon its own remaining traces. Disappearance is not total erasure, nor is formation a final completion. Each new image carries the marks left by its previous states.
The “transition” explored in Flowing is therefore not a movement from one definite state to another, but a process that continues through relationship, time, and memory. We change others, and are changed by them; every approach and departure may cause a slight shift in the self we once believed to be stable.
We believe we are becoming ourselves, yet it is difficult to see how many people have changed us.
Artwork Information
Flowing
Gelatin silver print
8 x 10 (inch)
edition of 1
2025 art taipei