DECK · Singapore · 2026 — English Reading Edition
Tieshanzhi 鐵山誌
Tieshanzhi 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 Xu 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 Four Books
Qingtian Street
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.
Taiko Pine
Photographs and archival research reconstruct the pineapple-canning enterprise that rose in Waipu under Japanese colonial rule — 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.
Changhe Ji
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, Iron Anvil Mountain, and the crossing of the Da’an: image answering verse across a hundred years.
Tiefeng Shanfang Changhe Ji
The book that came first. Before the three volumes of Tieshanzhi, Li made this photo-book in the coastal flatland around Iron Anvil Mountain — gravel banks, river mouths, a dog on the sand at dusk. Its title is borrowed, in homage, from the family’s classical-poetry anthology of the same name, published in 1934. The trilogy followed.