What I Don’t Know

I don’t know anything about Taiwan. Not its history, not what matters to the people there, not what they need or what they’re building toward. Twenty-five million people live on that island in East Asia. There’s a republic that started in 1912 after the mainland fell apart. I know this from reading about it, not from understanding it the way you do when you live somewhere.

Chih Hsien Chen is one of those 25 million. He’s twenty-two, studying at Tainan Tech in the south, and he takes photographs. Just photographs the young people around him, people his own age, and there’s something in how he does it that reminds me of Miri Matsufuji or Ren Hang—that moment when the camera catches something real in someone’s eyes. Youth, rebellion, honesty. It’s just there.

His photos are colorful but not sweet about it. Beautiful without feeling trapped in any particular moment. There’s a clarity in them, a confidence about what’s worth paying attention to and what isn’t.

I still don’t know Taiwan. But looking at his work, something in me understands what it’s like to be that age in that place, even though I’ve never been there and probably never will. It’s a small window, and sometimes that’s enough.