Form is emptiness; emptiness is form

Interestingly, when I started to take a photo on my iPhone 4 in Edinburgh in 2010, I also used Hipstamatic. It was firstly for fun, but later I noticed that the in-built filter helped me produce B/W photos; I continued to apply the filter and ‘generate’ many data’. Meanwhile, I also noticed that such an unorthodox tool and form would probably not be regarded as “Photography” because I did not process and develop any films in the traditional darkroom nor touch them up via the digital darkroom. So the reality shown in these photographic images is not what I saw on the spot as the algorithm programmed them. Suddenly, I felt stunned and overwhelmed that I wondered if I was the one who created something, what have I captured except for data and whether I had just become part of the process of visual mass production.

I was scared as I did not see any artistic value if the final piece was never decided by me but by chance, and I doubted if it was a cult of Photography. What is the value of digitalised images? As a relatively new art form, Photography may be dying and will vanish someday.

Photography, recording reality, such as war, was the primary purpose of photographic images. The difficulty of capturing each photo and the complicated theories, techniques, and danger made Photography worthwhile. Therefore, for some time, I tended to believe that by manipulating the data I have got and with other considerations of exhibiting and image-processing, the traditionally reckoned values would continue to exist, and I would be the master controlling the authorship.

However, over the past ten years, the visual world has changed tremendously with the advancement of technology. Representational images may be just an extract of a motion clip; all motion films are composed of frames. The decisive moment seems easy to achieve as we can adjust the frame we want. The content recorded in images seems to lose its importance, while the context and effects of the images have become crucial.

I was also trying to refuse the dying of Photography, so I started two other series of my photographic work. In my homelands, by creating consciously, I still wanted to take control of what I would like to express through my photographic work. By deliberately arranging the interaction of the work and the surrounding, the work became part of reality, and I recreated the reality(e.g.exhibition layout). In coffee shops in Tainan, I knew that one day many of them would be closed, and the reality at the moment the shutter was pressed would only exist in my works.

Now reflecting on my work and the articles provided on the website, it is interesting to realise that I think what was mentioned about Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the three orders was what I experienced during my journey of ‘photographic creation’ and the transformation of the state of Photography between undead and dead. It seems that we are no longer trying to replicate reality but by playing visually with tools.

I now hold a broader view of what Photography is and how we can transmit ideas via images. We might no longer be the Masters of the visual world; instead, objects and symbols. Recently, AI has been able to generate images, and research has proved that by processing MRI data of humans, AI can regenerate what we see in the real world. Thus, I could not stop thinking of a sentence in Buddhist Heart Sutra, ‘Form is emptiness; emptiness is form’.