Yehlin Lee: Raw Soul

Overview

Taiwan. Thrust into being by plate tectonics millions of years ago, this island is like a blade of grass emerging from a crack in a stone. For centuries, various cultures arrived, and departed, wiping away the remnant memories of those who came before and engraving traces of their own desires. Today, this land has become an urban landscape of inhabitants disquieted by a myriad of daily pressures.

What draws me in are these pressurized, undefinable transition zones where change and replacement occur, as daylight sets on the fringes of urban development. Competing forces seem to be hidden behind the chaos of people, objects, and landscapes: the sacred and secular, hope and despair, decline and renewal.

Substantive yet apparently empty, half-dead yet also half-alive, these states of life often confound me. Is this a manifestation of meaning in the world, or an external projection of my own inner self? I remain silent, waiting for the background noise in my heart to dissipate, to perceive the world without intention in an attempt to penetrate the margins of the Taiwanese collective consciousness. That elusive Taiwanese essence may well be concealed within the chaos and confusion.

I savour this confusion in darkness until the moment I hear the reverberation in my heart, and press the shutter.