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Cross-Boundary Dream Pursuers: Taiwanese Painters’ Trajectories in Foreign Countries during the Japanese Colonial Period

Publication date: 22 Apr 2019
Author: Jao Tsu-hsien |Staff member of the Archives of Institute of Taiwan History

On the Open House day in 2018, the Archives of the Institute of Taiwan History featured an exhibition, Travel Memories II—Taiwanese Painters’ Landscape Sketches, from digital records collected by the Archives in recent years. This exhibition selected four Taiwanese painters, Yen Shui-long, Liu Chi-hsiang, Chen Cheng-po, and Kuo Hsueh-hu, by presenting the records of their passports, certificates, photographs, correspondence, and paintings and exploring their life experiences of practicing goals, embarking on adventures abroad, and contributing to society. Let us trace the senior painters’ paths of crossing borders and pursuing dreams by appreciating these precious records and the abundant colors in their paintings!

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IV. The equipment and technique of photography that John Thomson applied

The photography technique that John Thomson applied was wet-plate collodion, which was invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. The equipment included a wooden camera, a portable tent to be a dark room, glass plate negatives, collodion and silver nitrate used to be sensitizers and developers. However, walking in the old-growth forest with the equipment was not convenient at all. Hence, John Thomson hired several porters assisting him to take photographs. Since the exposing process of wet-plate collodion took several seconds to 2 minutes, the photographer’s expertise and his interaction with the models were both tested. Surprisingly, there were no serious conflicts between the plain aborigines in Taiwan and western people. It was likely that Dr. Maxwell’s introduction already won the trust from Taiwanese plain aborigines. Therefore, they were calm and comfortable when facing John Thomson’s lens. According to what Thomson wrote in Through China: with a Camera, we can know that Taiwanese plain aborigines were very hospitable.


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