何日君再來 / When Will You Return

My mother is aging in Florida. I live in Taiwan with my wife and her family. I cannot be in both places. Taiwan became home in the way that only time and people can make a place home. But staying means I am not with my mother. Should we leave to be near her, my wife forgoes her own obligations to her family and to the life she has always known here.

Taiwan lives under a pressure that some people carry, and others have learned to set aside. Both responses are part of daily life here. The photographs I make come from inside that tension.

The title borrows from Teresa Teng, whose music was banned by authorities on both sides of the strait, for different reasons, by different fears. The question the song asks has never belonged to one side. My mother asks it from Florida. My wife’s family would ask if we leave. I ask it of whichever place I am not.

The photographs are constructed. I build situations that test whether ritual, confrontation, or rehearsal can produce the clarity that living inside this problem cannot. The camera doesn’t resolve them either. It only confirms that the question remains, and that I am not outside it.

Their presence moves through the work, shifting between my wife and my mother. Neither settles long enough to be the only one you carry.