Author:Yang Shun-Fa(1964-)

Category：Digital Print

Year：2015

Size:Length:74 x Width:134 (cm)

Weight:4130g

Introduction：Since 2014, Yang Shun-Fa has joined artist Lee Jiun-Shyan’s “Island Project,” conducting field surveys and interviews along Taiwan’s southwestern coast from south to north. The Submerged Beauty of Formosa series is an important result of these travels. When photographing, he often brought his own ladder, waded into water up to his knees, and stood on the ladder to shoot from above. This bird’s-eye viewpoint allows a sweeping view of houses that, blurred by floodwaters, have long since been uninhabited, collapsed and in ruin. Set against the distant horizon, where the ring road and township buildings appear, the foreground dwellings seem all the more isolated in their tilting collapse and desolation amid the floods. In this photograph, the figure walking at the left is striking, suggesting that this was once a place where people could move about and live. The title “Zhangtan Salt Field” indicates that since Japanese Rule this area has been an important salt-production zone of Budai, Chiayi. Later, when the seawall burst, the salt fields were forced to close; the scenes of a once-prosperous salt industry, workers shouldering salt and drying salt, are no longer to be seen, and the salt-making industry has largely been replaced by mechanization. This photograph also symbolizes the bleakness that followed the decline of the salt-industry town.

—— Kuan Hsiu-Hui, Research Project on the Interpretation of Photographic Works, 2020.

Accession number:NCP2018-013-0001