“Man Who Captured the Landscape: Photography and Revisit of Fang Ching-Mian” centers at the Chiayi photographer, Fan Ching-Mian’s mountain photography. The exhibition further combines the return visits taken by contemporary photo researchers and the Chiayi Art Museum’s curatorial team.
Fan Ching-Mian (1905-1973), known as Uncle Hsin-Kao, had been running the Hsin-Kao Photo Studio (formerly known as Niitaka Shashinkan) in Chiayi City for over fifty years since 1927. In addition to a photo studio’s general business, such as the commissioned festival “outdoor photography,” he gradually developed a business model of selling mountain landscape photo prints and mountain-hiking group portraits after climbing Yushan (Niitakayama) in 1926 for the first time. His practice was unique and exclusive in the development of pre-war commercial photography. He had traveled back and forth between the city, Alishan and Yushan to photograph mountains and provide photo services to the tourists throughout his life. Also, he claimed to have climbed Yushan over three thousand times. Before the war, he used view cameras and practiced dry plate photography. In contrast, after the war, he applied black-and-white negatives to photograph various places’ landscapes, leaving more than a thousand photographs. Fang had to overcome challenging natural factors to take his mountain landscape photographs. Beneath the delicateness and tranquilness within the images, viewers can see traces of the interaction and intervention between mountain scenery, human beings, and nature. From his photographic works, we may tell how one observes and imagines their environment or even reflect their conquest and desire for nature under different socio-political contexts.
“Man Who Captured the Landscape: Photography and Revisit of Fang Ching-Mian” is curated by the Chiayi Art Museum and realized with research of the Photograph Revisit Team, formed with contemporary art workers and photo researchers Lee Hsu-Pin, Chen Chia-Chi, and Your Bros. Filmmaking Group. First, the exhibition focuses on Chiayi Photographer Fang Ching-Mian’s mountain landscape photograph, setting its core at Fang’s early photographic works on Yushan developed with dry plates and part of his black-and-white Alishan photographs to trace the history of the Hsin-Kao Photo Studio and exploring the significances of images made a century ago. Second, the exhibition takes geographic paths as the basis of the revisiting and re-exploration of photos, anchoring Fang Ching-Mian’s mountain-climbing route before the war and the observation location of his photographic views, aiming to develop a dialectical journey between the contemporary and the past. In this exhibition, the multi-layer “photograph revisit” will be presented in the postcard form in-between Fang’s photographs and objects he left, as well as audio descriptions by Fang Zhong-Xiong, Fang Ching-Mian’s eldest son. His audio narrations will provide a testimonial perspective and significant pointer to the early collection of photographic production.