VOP Issue 8 : 物件夢遊 Trance Amongst Objects

Why do we look at “objects”? Photography gives us a chance to gaze and contemplate, to displace objects from their usual roles in our daily lives, and then re-focus our attention onto these everyday objects, evoking new dialogues between these objects and us. Our gazes fall upon them, sometimes exploring, sometimes avoiding certain things – which seem closer to us at times, and more removed from us at other times.

In this issue of VOP, Chen Xiaoyun starts a game of searching for meaning through fiddling with fallen branches and titles of his photos as image-texts in his fictitious book Zhuiku Tablet Annotations; Jiang Zhi expresses his burning feelings through flowers in flames; Kishi Kota constructs images with discarded items that he salvaged, presenting to the audience a mosaic of relationships between objects and images; Chen Wei uses everyday objects to create a silent stage, displaying the exceptional qualities of these common items in our daily lives.

This issue of Artist’s Showcase introduces Kikuchi Tomoko, who is recently awarded the Kimura Ihei Award with her I and I series of photographs. She has been documenting drag queens in China for a long time, exploring the sensitive and much repressed issue of gender consciousness in China through her lenses. In the Q columns, we interviewed Japanese critic Iizawa Kotaro, who talks about the point of views in photography critiques. In a dialogue with designer Naoto Fukasawa and photographer Tamotsu Fujii, we examine the relationship between photography as a medium and the objects it presents. Following this, we are reminded of the destructions caused by the human civilization through the pictures by Yasusuke Ota, of innocent animals abandoned in hells of the 311 Fukushima Nuclear Evacuation Zones. Also, this issue of VOP will kick start a series on “History of Photography in Taiwan” written by Hsiao Yong Seng, probing the historical footprints of photography in Taiwan.