Summer in the Bay! And more art-filled adventures. Here is just a glimpse of what June and July looked like for me. I got back to the Bay just in time for the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley featuring a whole panel on Taiwan. Author Shawna Yang Ryan signs some books, while…
Art-filled adventures around the Bay from this April and May! First off, Pace Gallery teamLab in Menlo Park. The main exhibits are very instagrammable. They’re mostly different light installations that run on infinitely variable algorithms, so they are supposed to factor in human interaction, but they’re not immediately responsive or anything, so the interactive aspect is…
It was such a pleasure to photograph Grace of HapaMama. She’s been following my work for a couple years thanks to our Taiwanese American connections, and I finally got to meet and photograph her last month. We met up in downtown San Jose and grabbed a combination of family portraits and headshots for Grace. See some…
On February 28, 1947 began the infamous events of “228,” a widespread massacre of tens of thousands of Taiwanese by the Nationalist (KMT) government that had recently arrived from China. The 228 Massacre became a taboo topic in the subsequent years of martial law that extended through the 1980s and had ripple effects that were felt…
Asha Tea House in Berkeley has long been one of my favorite tea spots, so I was excited to see that they opened a new location in San Francisco a few months ago. My friend Saira and I hopped over for a tea date one afternoon. Most orders at Asha are just handed over…
I first met and photographed Shawna six years ago, when her first book Water Ghosts had just been released by Penguin Press. Now her second novel has been completed and is available for preordering: Green Island. The book has been Shawna’s labor of love over the last decade and is a work of historic fiction set against the backdrop of Taiwanese and…
After a week at TAF, we drove back up from North Manchester, Indiana, to Chicago. I visit the city regularly, about once or twice a year, and though I’ve never lived in Chicago, it always feels a bit like home. Our days after TAF were still filled with TAFers, doing our classic post-TAF gathering in…
Sixteen years. That’s the number of times I’ve attended the Taiwanese American Foundation (TAF) summer camp. It’s a long time to spend with anything (so long that I lost count and spent the entire week thinking that I was on my fifteenth year), and I found myself struggling with the question, how do you stay…
Taiwanese American Foundation (TAF) is a summer camp that I have attended almost every year since the age of ten. It’s just one week, 200 Taiwanese American youth, and a small college campus in North Manchester Indiana. But of course, it provides an endless supply of life-changing experiences, memories, and relationships. In countless ways, TAF has shaped…
I don’t know who started it, calling him the godfather of Taiwanese America, but I think the title’s going to stick. Ho Chie has been involved with almost every Taiwanese American organization imaginable, and he even had a hand in creating many of them. One of his ongoing projects is TaiwaneseAmerican.org, an online portal that spotlights…
I can still remember her as my quiet, smart, cool little camper when I, fresh out of middle school, served my first year as a counselor-in-training at our annual summer camp. Some things haven’t changed at all since those days– Mayline’s radiant smile and her generosity amongst them– but it’s been quite the privilege to see her…
The warm air wrapped around me as I walked down the street in Virginia Highlands and headed out in the beautiful Atlanta neighborhood to take some photographs– on film. Here are a few of my images on Kodak Portra 400, with a couple more black and white frames from the previous roll as well. Love…