Pardon: Tsun-shing Cheng Photography Exhibition: A Personal Passage: Part I

It has been over 40 years since Cheng’s last exhibition in Taiwan, Life in Luzhou, at the Young Lion Gallery in Taipei in 1975. His name has only been seen in a few books on aesthetics and photography theory, as well as in the credit list of a series of documentaries titled The Inspired Island. However, Cheng has never ceased photography during his absence. His obsession with silver halide photography compelled him to preserve the negatives he accumulated over the past 40 years as if they were the pages of a precious memoir, but he did not begin developing the photographs and displaying them until five years ago, when he felt the time was right.

In the last five years, Cheng has been extracting images from his 40-year archive and organizing them into five chapters of his life story. The first chapter, Won’t Somebody Bring the Light, was first exhibited in 2015, which includes photographs he took from 1973 to 1978 during his travels across Taiwan. His second chapter, Firefly and Light, which was recently exhibited at the end of 2019 at the Long Museum in Shanghai, encapsulates his journeys throughout Europe and America between 1976 and 1980.

Cheng went to France to study in 1976, and this experience became a pivotal moment in his photography career. Prior to this, he had not received any formal academic training. Death became the heart of his life-long investigation. The images of architectural ruins, funeral processions, outdoor stages, cities, countrysides, numerous faces, and wasteland captured through his lens demonstrate his deep concern and fondness for his homeland. At that time, Cheng was — as he describes in a personal statement — much like “the one who holds the candle,” a young guide silently leading others through the darkness by candlelight, while the dim glow of its flames reflects gently upon him.

After arriving in France, he received professional training in philosophy and photography. He documented through his lens an era defined by the frantic pursuit of philosophical thought until the breaking point of Götterdämmerung, or the collapse of a society. While there, he frequently interacted with laborers, a tendency he carried over from his childhood, having been immersed in the environment of his family business. His candid portraits of workers and everyday people manifest the human condition with an exquisite tenderness in each of his subjects, who span a diversity of age, gender, and ethnicity. While the settings and circumstances of these two chapters of his life are dramatically different, the viewer is encouraged to experience both through the artist’s careful, discerning gaze.