The Vanishing Portraits, Jinsha, Kinmen

作品賞析

LIU Yun-Yi is a Taiwanese artist living in Germany, and her Vanishing Portraits series depict a collection of buildings in East German and Taiwanese cities that have either disappeared or were left forgotten as a result of changes in time or war. LIU Yun-Yi would first take dozens and even hundreds of photographs of the same building at different times and from different perspectives before reassembling them. This photograph from The Vanishing Portraits series in Kinmen shows a half-abandoned colonial building that closely resembles Taiwanese buildings during the Japanese colonial period. The highly decorated exteriors hint at the building’s proud past. Today, however, the patch of land before the porch is now overgrown with weeds, showing obvious signs of neglect and dilapidation. LIU Yun-Yi adopted direct photography of the front face of this building to depict a monument-like appearance, opening a new avenue to resurrect vanishing memories of our personal and historical past.