Artist Talk: “The Distance Between Taipei and New York” by Wayne Liu

This talk introduces a body of work that treats photography not as a means of preservation, but as a material process through which memory erodes over time. Working with family photographs, personal archives, and aged photographic papers and chemical developers, I repeatedly print and transform images so that they shift, degrade, and approach disappearance. Moving between darkroom and digital systems, the work traces how images carry the residues of war, migration, and intergenerational silence, forming a dispersed geography across China, Taiwan, and the United States. Through repetition, distortion, and fragmentation, photography becomes a site where personal and political histories surface, fracture, and persist at the edge of visibility.

About Wayne:

I was born in Taiwan in 1979, like my parents, but unlike my grandparents, who fled China in 1949. At five, I moved to Texas, then New Jersey, where I learned how to be American. At eleven, I returned to Taiwan, where I was suddenly expected to relearn how to be Taiwanese. This dislocation, marked by resistance and estrangement, unfolded under the shadow of “China,” a concept shaped by my grandparents’ memories and Taiwan’s authoritarian past. Yet I resisted forming a Taiwanese identity, still imagining myself in the American suburbs outside New York City.

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Host or Publisher Alice Austen House