Formosa explores Taiwan’s suspended identity through flood-scarred landscapes and imperfect cyanotypes washed by water. Between documentary and staged fiction, the work traces what it feels like to exist in parentheses — visible, yet never fully centered.

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In Parentheses: The Poetic Politics of In-Betweenness in Formosa is my year long undergraduate thesis project exploring what it means to live inside prolonged ambiguity, with a photo series and a research paper in conversation.

The work began with something personal: the way I constantly adjust how I explain where I’m from, just like in one image, an elephant occupies the space without apology. Taiwan often enters conversation carefully — framed, softened, strategically described. It is visible, but rarely centered on its own terms. That condition of being acknowledged yet held aside became the emotional core of the project.

After severe flooding in Guangfu Township, Hualien, I returned to Taiwan to photograph landscapes physically rewritten by water — collapsed levees, displaced furniture, riverbeds rerouted by force. I went because distance made the disaster feel abstract, and I didn’t want my relationship to home to become theoretical. The flood became structural to the work: an external force reshaping the ground without consent, echoing how Taiwan’s political condition is shaped by pressures beyond itself.

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This logic carries into the material process. Cyanotype is completed by washing the print in water. I allow that washing to remain visible — streaks, uneven exposures, partial erasures. Water becomes both collaborator and disruptor. The image stabilizes, but never fully. The staged figure is performed by my mother, but not autobiographical. She becomes a body receiving projections of punctuation: parentheses, and a Chinese knot. These marks, alongside with the fly, function as emotional grammar. Parentheses are where something is allowed to exist, but only conditionally. 

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Taiwan often feels like that hinge — ongoing, unresolved. Rather than arguing, Formosa builds an atmosphere. It asks what it feels like to exist in a state that is constantly named from the outside. The work stays in that suspension — not resolving it, but insisting that endurance itself is a form of presence.