Colors from a Country I Don’t Know

I know almost nothing about Taiwan. Its geography I could sketch badly; its history I’d have to look up; what daily life looks like in Tainan or Taipei—all of it is mostly a political abstraction to me. Twenty-five million people living on an island I carry around in my head as a concept rather than a place.

Then there’s Chih Hsien Chen. He was twenty-two when I first came across his work, studying at Tainan University of Technology in the south of the country, and he’d already developed a way of photographing the young people around him that felt true. Not documentary-true—emotionally true. The kind of photograph where you can sense the temperature of the room, the quality of the afternoon light, whether the person in front of the lens is actually present or just going through the motions of being photographed.

His work reminds me of Miri Matsufuji’s portraits, or Ren Hang’s—that specific frequency of youth where rebellion and tenderness coexist in someone’s face before life separates them out. The images are saturated without being sweet, bold without being cheap. Whatever is in the eyes of the people he photographs reads clearly across any cultural distance.

I still know almost nothing about Taiwan. But looking at Chen’s photographs, I feel one small step less ignorant—not about its history or its politics, but about what it might feel like to be young there, to wear a certain expression, to push against something even if you can’t name what. That feeling doesn’t need translation.