
SOMETHING VIBRANT
- Publisher
- Akaaka Art Publishing
- Year
- 2024
- ISBN
- 978-4-86541-187-4
- Specifications
- Hardcover
305 x 235 mm
152 pages
Book design by Fan-Yu Zhou
A decade of photographs, from 2014 to 2023, made along the rivers near his home in Ankeng, Xindian, New Taipei, by the Taiwanese photographer Su Hou-Wen, who realised after moving there how close he could be to water. From upstream to downstream, in rivers that never stop changing, he follows the shape of the land, the lives of plants and animals and the ways people relate to the water: winding roads, capricious weather, small towns and mountains with a touch of wildness and some lost memories. Wandering through it all, he meets people who may be long-time residents, newcomers escaping the city or hermits, odd rocks that have become forgotten memorials, and rivers reduced for urbanites to tourism and recreation. Together with text, the pictures turn into metaphors for the heterogeneity of life, along fluid boundaries where layers of time surface and the river rewrites memory.