Taipower Art Festival — Repose (2024)
Curated by Eva Lin

Gold is written into the name of Jinguashi (金瓜石), a mining town on Taiwan's northeast coast. For a century, from the discovery of gold and copper in the late 1800s until the Shuinandong Smelter (水湳洞選煉廠) closed in 1987, extraction defined the town. The deeper history is one of collapse. Distant stars collapsed to forge gold, empires collapsed and surrendered it, and a global market collapsed and left it behind.

These photographs were made in the long blue hour that followed. From dusk into night, I walked alone between Shuinandong Harbor (水湳洞漁港) and the summit of Teapot Mountain (無耳茶壺山). As the remains of that golden era collapse into vegetation and memory, I use visible and ultraviolet light to provoke a response from the rocks and ruins, the minerals and overgrowth answering with a fluorescence of their own.