Photography · Writing · Family History

Tieshan Zhi 鐵山誌

Tieshan Zhi is a long-form photographic and literary project rooted in Waipu, a rural township on the Houli Plateau in central Taiwan. It traces the inheritance of the Hsu family, the artist’s maternal lineage, across more than a century of migration, commerce, literature, and political upheaval — approaching family heritage not as nostalgia, but as living material to be re-translated.

The project has its roots in a 2019 initiative, led by the historian Li Kai-yang, to digitize and organize the Hsu family’s archives, whose findings were folded into the Ministry of Culture’s National Cultural Memory Bank. Drawn in as a descendant rather than a scholar, the artist began in 2021 to photograph the landscape, attend family gatherings, and study the literature and steles left by earlier generations of the family. In 2023 the work received the Wu Dongxing Photography Grant.

The Books

Volume One

Qingtian Street

青田街

A personal essay in images. It begins with a death in the family and drifts through a chain of chance encounters — a returning elder, a fortune-teller, a writer-friend — each one quietly tied to a family history the artist barely knew. The opening movement of the project.

Read in English → 中文版 日本語

Volume Two

Taiko Pine

大甲鳳梨罐詰 · The Dajia Pineapple Cannery

Photographs and archival research reconstruct the pineapple-canning enterprise that rose in Waipu under Japanese colonial rule — the only cannery in Taiwan to refuse the colonial state’s forced merger — and the unlikely friendship with the Japanese political figure Tōyama Mitsuru that helped keep the family’s venture afloat. Present-day images converse with a fragmentary commercial past.

Read in English → 中文版 日本語

Volume Three

Changhe Ji

唱和集 · Anthology of Poetic Correspondence

A photographic answer to the family’s classical poetry. Retracing a Qing-era trading route — rattan and salt carried between mountain and coast — that the family once walked, Li photographs in dialogue with century-old poems on the Dajia River, Tiezhen Mountain, and the crossing of the Da’an: image answering verse across a hundred years.

Read in English → 中文版 日本語

The Precursor · made first

Tiefeng Shanfang Changhe Ji

鐵峰山房唱和集

The book that came first. Before the three volumes of Tieshan Zhi, Li photographed the whole reach of country from Tiezhen Mountain down to the Da’an River and the red badlands of Flame Mountain — a dog on the gravel shore, a dune at the river mouth, then inland to eroded ridgelines, white-trunked woods and one dead tree still standing, the cobbled dark of Mystery Cave, and a wildfire burning into dusk. Its title is borrowed, in earnest homage, from the Hsu family’s classical-poetry anthology of the same name, published in 1934: the ground the trilogy grew out of.

Turn the pages → photo-book