"In the decade I have spent teaching graduate art students, I have witnessed certain prevailing (if occasionally annoying) themes. Among them, a delirious fascination with the everyday, the banal, the flâneur; an abiding interest in skewing perception and challenging temporal conventions; and perhaps more than anything else, an almost pathological attraction to exposing detritus of all kinds. (Indeed, in recent years I have seen students filming asphalt, cataloguing dryer lint and producing exhaustive photo essays on expired bread tags.) Yet more troubling to me than any of this is their almost evangelical resistance to historical sources, calling them boring, or dated, or worse: nostalgic. Having come of age in an era characterized by technology-enhanced experiences of all kinds, there is a tendency among many 20-something students to harbor a deep skepticism about history of any kind. Such skepticism frequently evidences itself in a resistance to sources that pre-date, say, 1990."

This opening paragraph in Jessica Helfands article The Art of Elegant Abstraction got me thinking about the direction of some of my work lately. I have another website in which I share photographs on a daily or somewhat daily basis. I tend to focus on themes of the everyday and banal (to use her language) in a very up close and personal manner. I thought I was sharing my experience through the objects and places I have seen. I thought that focusing on creating perfection or only recording the instances of percieved beauty that so many people are looking for as subjects was unreal. I never thought it was annoying.

In Taiwan especially this little site has recieved a suprising amount of cristicism for such a low key and decidedly personal project. Most cristicism has followed a theme of why would I want to photograph instances of urban life that are "ugly" instead of searching for all the beauty that is aparent. I never thought that I was so mainstream and I never thought that urban life was so ugly. Why must we deviate so far from reality?

Read:Design Observer: writings about design & culture: The Art of Elegant Abstraction

Categorized: Living in Taiwan

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