Ben Sloat’s two-dozen photographs currently on display at Taipei City’s American Cultural Center in an exhibition titled Yellow in August are firmly rooted in the documentary tradition of Swiss-American photographer Robert Franks, who 50 years ago traveled across the US taking pictures that challenged traditional notions of American life by depicting all strata of society.
Like Franks, Sloat views photography as a journey. But rather than spending two years wandering across the US, Sloat spent the better part of the past year photographing the region surrounding Meinung (美濃) Township in Kaohsiung County, where he recorded the area’s landscape and how it is intimately bound up with the cultural heritage and spiritual beliefs of its people.
“I’m interested in iconography and mythology and how we create our own iconography that surrounds our life,” he said in an interview earlier this month. “Taiwan has the Confucian idea of society and a Buddhist idea of the afterlife and a very Taoist idea of interaction and an almost animist idea of the land — the land as embodied by spirits and gods.”
Sloat, 32, teaches photography, digital media, and photo history at the Art Institute of Boston, Massachusetts, and took a year off to photograph the region after obtaining a Fulbright Scholarship. His mother hails from Kaohsiung, which prompted Stoat to choose Meinung as his base, an area that he says “parallels other [places] in Taiwan.”
One of Sloat’s concerns is how people retain their identities in the midst of change, he said.
In Clan House Concrete, Sloat investigates the tension between new and old. The photo shows a run-down traditional clan home sandwiched between and dwarfed by two recently built structures. The image alludes to the inevitability of change.
“Who doesn’t want to live in a brand-new house? But how do you preserve the old-style Hakka houses, which have a different kind of cultural value?” he said.
Sloat’s photography doesn’t offer us any simple or direct answers to those questions. And yet, his images depicting religious practices suggest that although much has changed, much remains the same.
HEAVEN ON EARTH
One obstacle confronting any photographer wanting to portray Taiwan’s rich and diverse religious culture is doing so without, as Sloat said, “exoticizing or objectifying it.”
There is probably no amount of research that can prepare a person for the sight of an entranced spirit medium self-flagellating with a spiked mace.
Taoist Flagellants shows, in the foreground, a spirit medium and his retinue performing a ceremony on a large cement platform, while Man at Parade is a close-up of a martial character in the middle of a crowded street procession. Taken individually, both are stereotypical images of Taiwan’s religious culture. Combined, however, they hone in on the function of these performances to provide contact between the earthly and heavenly realms.
With so many roadside graves and cemeteries dotting the area’s landscape, it is unsurprising that death frequently appears in this series. Tomb in Rice Field shows a burial mound located in the middle of a rice paddy and deftly illustrates the intimate connection between man, the spirit world and the land.
Farmland Next to River shifts the perspective to a semi-urban setting. A farmer walks along the side of a garden plot located in the middle of a canal’s dry bed, framed by buildings one side, an image that encapsulates man’s desire to control nature.
There is much else on view here of interest (I particularly liked Man Harvesting Water Vegetables, a superb photo of a naked man emerging from a swamp that echoes the myth of Nuwa (女媧), the Chinese goddess who fashioned humans from the mire). And although Sloat’s Yellow in August doesn’t provide as large a survey of society as Franks did with The Americans, his photographic journey leads down many fascinating roads.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
Mongolian influencer Anudari Daarya looks effortlessly glamorous and carefree in her social media posts — but the classically trained pianist’s road to acceptance as a transgender artist has been anything but easy. She is one of a growing number of Mongolian LGBTQ youth challenging stereotypes and fighting for acceptance through media representation in the socially conservative country. LGBTQ Mongolians often hide their identities from their employers and colleagues for fear of discrimination, with a survey by the non-profit LGBT Centre Mongolia showing that only 20 percent of people felt comfortable coming out at work. Daarya, 25, said she has faced discrimination since she