The last day of summer always carries a certain weight. The air shifts, the light softens, and somewhere between nostalgia and vacation mode, I feel myself settling back into the rhythm of creating. As part of that, I want to keep sharing reflections, fragments, and the stories behind the images from my long-term project, The Land Remembers.
Lately, I’ve been immersed in Chapter 2, which traces Taiwan’s political awakening and the collective yearning for democratic reform. It’s a chapter where memory and history meet in the streets, and where my lens became both witness and participant.
In the streets of Taipei, history doesn’t just linger, it walks beside the people. I’ve followed its shadow through student occupations, campaign flags fluttering on weathered balconies, and the gravestones of those who never lived to see the future arrive.
This chapter moves from protest to possibility, from the Sunflower Movement blooming in front of the Legislative Yuan, to the election of Taiwan’s first female president. It drifts through White Terror Park, where memory rests but does not sleep, and pauses with a descendant in Kaohsiung, holding the weight of inherited grief.
The photographs are fragments gathered at eye level, through crowds, against construction-lined sidewalks, beside campaign banners and anti-nuclear signs. They are both record and reflection. Ordinary in spirit, but deeply personal in rhythm. They ask how democracy feels, not how it looks in textbooks.
What I’m working toward is something less literal, more poetic. Democracy not as a finished form, but as a living negotiation between past and future, one embodied in movement, in memory, in ordinary people.
This chapter feels heavy, but it’s also alive with hope. And now comes the hardest part: selecting which images carry that balance.
I’ll begin sharing them on Instagram in the coming days. I’d love to hear your thoughts, what resonates, what lingers, what surprises you. They’ll help guide me as I shape this chapter into the book and exhibition I’m dreaming of. 🙂