Photography

Cornelia Lauf’s love affair with Rome spans four decades of her work as an art historian, deepening after she moved to the Eternal City in 1998 with her then-husband, Joseph Kosuth. For nearly three decades, she has been both a participant and an observer of Rome’s contemporary art scene. From this vantage point, Lauf shares her perspective on the city while inviting a voice forty years younger—Lebanese artist-curator Majd El Roumi, based in Rome—to contribute his own portrait of this community through photographs of key practitioners.

Roger Boyce explores the photographic still lifes of New Zealand artist Fiona Pardington in lucid, evocative prose. Drawing on the history of painting, he examines their rich pathos and visual power as an 'amor fati'—a profound veneration of things in their inviolable circumstance.

Yao Jui-Chung is one of Taiwan’s most acclaimed contemporary artists. In this major 2020 interview with White Fungus editor Ron Hanson—conducted on the occasion of his mid-career retrospective Republic of Cynic at C-LAB—he reflects on coming of age after martial law, running a karaoke room during his Air Force military service, and Taiwan’s complex history and identity.

Noise music in Taiwan emerged in the 1990s, a tumultuous period of social upheaval following the lifting of 38 years of martial law. In the frenzied atmosphere of street clashes and political demonstrations, artists explored previously taboo subjects and experimented with radical forms. It was in this context that Taiwan's noise movement was born. Jeph Lo witnessed the evolution and reflects on that messy but protean time. His article is accompanied by photographs of political demonstrations of the period by Leon Tsai and Tsai Ming-Te.

In this series of wide-angle polaroids, Yao Jui-Chung photographs Madou Temple's animatronic religious display and other similar depictions of hell from throughout Taiwan and Singapore.

Henri Cartier-Bresson famously photographed the final days of the Chinese Civil War. Remarkably, an exhibition of these historic images was slated for both Taipei and Beijing—two capitals with diametrically opposed views of that history. The Beijing showing was cancelled due to COVID-19, but the exhibition opened at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in late 2020. David Frazier examines its reception in Taiwan, considers how it might have been received in Beijing, and explores the thorny historical and political context.