Chien-Yu Liu X Taiwan Youth Association for Transitional Justice and Kiōng-Seng

This project centers on the concept of democracy, using food object photography as a point of entry to explore the connection between historical trauma and personal memory. Food, as one of the most accessible elements in daily life, carries both individual and collective narratives.

I selected foods associated with the February 28 Incident and Taiwan’s democratic history—including squid congee, fish, fruits, and Japanese rice balls—as conduits for telling these stories. These food items serve not only as symbolic objects through which narratives are communicated, but also as layered embodiments of personal and collective experience.

Film, as both an image-producing material and a physical medium, carries inherent visual traces of time and process due to the uncertainties within its development. These qualities lend themselves to a form of visual storytelling that responds to historical events or memories—stories that have been worn down, layered, and reshaped over time. In an era when digital images can be infinitely reproduced and instantly edited, choosing film as a medium becomes an act of reflection on the nature of images themselves. As a recording technology with materiality, film emphasizes the occurrence of an image rather than its production, granting the image a sense of temporality, chance, and fragility.

This choice of medium aligns with my understanding of history and memory: history is not preserved or re-presented in a linear fashion, but rather, like film, is continually reactivated, reconstructed, and forgotten.

By using film—a medium marked by temporality and unpredictability—and allowing selected food items to physically influence the development process, I aim to transform these images into more than neutral representations. Instead, they emerge as expressions imbued with traces, distortions, and textures, much like the afterimages of memories washed over by time.