Kaohsiung Photo Collection
I read this with great interest for a number of reasons Lisa Chen

 

Kaohsiung Photo Collection, 2020, place of discovery

 

 

Kaohsiung Photo Collection, 2020, the entirety of the find

 

 

Kaohsiung Photo Collection, 2020, photo album Flowers on a gold background

 

 

Kaohsiung Photo Collection, 2020, photographs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Kaohsiung Photo Collection

 

In 2020 I spent over half a year in Taiwan.

In early April when returning with a friend from a late dinner I discovered by chance a huge pile of things trashed in front of one of the houses in my neighborhood. I have seen quite a similar pile in the very same place two weeks earlier, possibly coming from another floor of the building.

Most probably the previous owner of the house passed away and the new owner decided to empty it. I faced already a similar situation a couple of times in Warsaw where replacement of generations has been happening a lot. It happens also often in NYC, where enormous wealth of part of the society on one hand, and on the other hand lack of affordable space at the same time make people be less attached to objects and getting rid of them a lot making trash containers places of great finds.

We started trash diving in this pile and among vintage clothes, shoes, kitchen tools, all kinds of papers, books, documents and all sorts of other personal belongings and garbage I discovered a big amount of photos: 40 albums and 19 additional sets of them in small plastic bags. Some 1800 pictures in total.

This unprecedented life-long collection of photographs, starting from about 1930's and ending in 2012, pictures a life of a single, wealthy, independent, and very religious woman who passionately and endlessly traveled around the globe taking dozens of snapshots in every location she visited; the Statue of Liberty and World Trade Center, Mount Fuji, waterfalls, forests, theme parks, weddings, funerals, parties, just mentioning a couple of themes and life occurrences captured on her photos.

These photographs started almost immediately to exist in my mind as a collection of my own imaginary aunt or maybe even of my mother – mediocre in its artistic value, caring a lot of emotions connecting together family members, friends, visited places, events etc.

The first idea about this find was an act of appropriation: using those images as my own to create visual works (incorporating it in my “Days” collage / various media on paper project) so that the collection would be saved, although broken down and de-fragmented since I would have to make my arbitrary decisions which photos I would like to use, cut, glue, etc.

This find happened a couple of days before I was invited to an exhibition about the coronavirus pandemic. Therefore I came up with an idea of preparing ten sets/editions of 10 images each for the show. One set would be framed and the other 9 editions would be destined for people willing to take them home and save them for next generations.

Soon after that, when I was making photo documentation of my entire find, I realized that my goal should rather be to save the collection as it is in its entirety, since its narration is both simple and complete.

However I'm still wondering if this saved collection of photographs represent any artistic potential and if it could really be used to create a body of work based on its content. Can art give us any answer at all to reflect on the complexity of challenges we are facing? Or its forms are rather like reflection of things, events and people on old photographs: nostalgic and emotional, but easily faded, forgotten and discarded.

In the end, this collection might actually be some sort of a burden in disguise. Being dumped by a new owner of the house it becomes someone else's treasure. Indeed, there is always a need to keep, collect, acquire some new objects and goods. It is unavoidable to want more. But actually, shouldn't we all be rather minimalists, reducing the amount of unnecessary things around us like old photos, books, clothes, etc. I believe that in the time to come once Covid-19 ends we will all have to ask again questions of what's really important, needed, and wanted in life.

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Subject: Re: Hello from Kaohsiung City

Lisa Chen

Wow, I read this with great interest for a number of reasons. One, as a lifelong shopper at thrift stores, I’ve often encountered such photographs. They are tossed into big bins, unsorted, but if you dig around you start lifting out what is clearly an entire family or individual’s photograph archive, through the ages as you discovered. I used to wonder how photos end up in thrift stores. Four years ago when my stepfather died, I had to go through his things which included a box of photos, many of them of his family in Alabama who I didn’t know. It was really hard to figure out what to do with them. I couldn’t keep them and I didn’t know anyone else who really wanted them. That’s when I realized how difficult and almost inhumane it feels to actually throw photos in the actual garbage (although in the end, I did actually do that to about 80% of them), which I think is how they end up in thrift stores, etc. 

The writer and photographer Teju Cole and a friend wrote this piece about such ‘found’ photos a few years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/magazine/the-digital-afterlife-of-lost-family-photos

But what an incredible find you came across in Taiwan. I envy the dumpster diving! And I agree, once they are in your possession, you end up having responsibility for them, whether as treasure or burden. It sounds like you haven’t yet decided what to do with them. The question of keeping them together or apart seems key…there is something almost mythological or Marvel Universe about the idea of having different people own separate parts of the archive, as though in the future they could be reassembled and the ‘collectors’ identified as being a kind of extended family of an anonymous ghost.

Your email also reminded me of an incident that happened to me, which in my memory, occurred right before I left San Francisco for New York in 2005. At the time I was unhappy and kind of stuck. I knew I needed a change and I was weary of SF which felt haunted by a whole bunch of ex-boyfriends (!!). Eras of my life had come and gone yet I continued to haunt the same locations. Then one day I saw a sign in the street near my apartment for an ‘estate sale.’ Do you know what those are? It’s when someone has died and they open up the house and pretty much put every single item in there for sale. I walked up to the apartment and looked around. All the objects were modest; the apt seemed to belong to a Black woman who lived alone. It was uncanny to walk among her things, and I left with a scrapbook she’d made of her childhood drawings, which I had no use for but felt I could protect in some way. I later came to think of this event as conclusive in my decision to leave San Francisco: It was melancholy and signaled an End with a capital E. I didn’t keep that scrapbook in my move.

When I moved to the US as a child from Taiwan, my family was on welfare and we bought just about everything used. So I’ve always been an advocate of giving away clothes and other objects, imagining they will have a second life with someone who can actually use them, as my family did. (I imagine as a childless person, I am also much less sentimental about familial interest in my “stuff”). Books are an exception, and, I’ve come to learn, it’s important to keep some sentimental objects as mementos to trigger memories. The other day I showed Andy all the pens in our pen jar that had branding (most of them hotels) on them and we pieced together the trips we were on where we acquired them. That was fun.

But this question: However I'm still wondering if this saved collection of photographs represent any artistic potential and if it could really be used to create a body of work based on its content. Can art give us any answer at all to reflect on the complexity of challenges we are facing? Or its forms are rather like reflection of things, events and people on old photographs: nostalgic and emotional, but easily faded, forgotten and discarded.

I too would have found the albums irresistible. It makes me think of Joseph Cornell and his workshop filled with drawers of objects that he kept for years, waiting for the exact tableau where the object should live. So it’s possible you may have to keep the photos for a while before they make their purpose visible! And yes I fully believe art is capable of taking on the moment we’re in…maybe not providing answers as you say, but being at least in conversation with, or wrestling on the mat with what we’re going through. Will anyone of it last or end up forgotten and trashed like those photos? I think that’s why I’ve always been attracted to ephemeral and street-based art works like Nobu’s and yours where the raw material is either ALREADY trash, or otherwise a facet of the (urban) environment and your intervention transfigures it. It’s like the art lasts and doesn’t last at the same time. Those street paintings you made are exemplary of this effect.

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