The Vanishing Portraits, Western-style Building, Kinmen, Taiwan

作品賞析

LIU Yun-Yi’s The Vanishing Portraits, Western-style Building, Kinmen, Taiwan is a local perspective photograph taken at different time and then re-assembled to create a memorial-like portrait of the building. Kinmen’s western-style buildings possess unique regional culture. Fellow Kinmen natives who went overseas to build their own businesses, in hopes of accentuating their elevating social status, introduced British and French architectural features that they had witnessed in Southeast Asia and commissioned local artisans to complete the construction. LIU Yun-Yi photographs these forgotten and abandoned locations to display these architectural images and re-initiate a dialog between space, cities, and history. These photographs grant the dilapidated ruins with a new sense of purpose and value, encouraging people to reminisce about the once fabulous but now forgotten part of urban history.