Yichia Liao (b.1961)

Yichia Liao an artist that practices photography and installation art is a significant figure in the field of Taiwan’s contemporary art photography. Liao’s fascination with time since the age of four has been the main reason for becoming an artist and embracing photography, a medium that has the ability to capture, dissect, and manipulate time. His artistic practice surrounds the relationship between time and the universe. Each series he extracts a certain element of the world and probes its relationship with time. His early embracement of digital photography has enabled him to expand this ideology through digital manipulation. Known for his strikingly detailed and excessively high-resolution images he is often viewed as a contemporary pictorialist upon the first encounter. Having a vigorous background in analogue photography and experiences in the darkroom he is highly influenced by modernist values. Yet he adopts issues and conveys his works in a conceptual and critical manner, resulting in an inevitable tension of conceptual and (extravagantly beautiful) subjectivity that coexists in his works which have become his signature style.