Creating a Parallel Universe — Hsieh Chun-Te’s Brave the World

By Chen Fang-Ming (Writer, Scholar)

When Hsieh Chun-Te invited me to participate in his photography project Brave the World, he gave no elaborate explanation. All he asked was that I arrive at a studio in Zhonghe at a specific time. After getting lost among the maze-like rooftops, I finally found the location—only to see architect Hsu Ching-Yue already half-naked under the studio lights. The scene startled me. I didn’t yet know what the project was about. I later learned that many other writers in Taipei had already participated—Sun Ta-Chuan, Wu Jing-Ji, Tsai Shih-Ping, Hsiang Yang, Chiu Kun-Liang, Lin Wen-Yi—this gave me some reassurance. Clearly, there was a larger meaning behind this.

Before the photo session, I was interviewed by volunteers from a Catholic foundation for people with dementia. They had read my essay “Flowing Into the Sea,” written in memory of my mother who had Alzheimer’s. The deepest sorrow as a son, I wrote, was sitting beside one’s mother—her warm palm still in yours—while her eyes stared vacantly through you. I would tell her funny stories to try to elicit a reaction. Sometimes, a slight smile flickered on her lips, which I took as a sign of connection. Other times, she would fix her gaze on a distant point, seeing things that weren’t there. “Who’s standing outside the window?” she would ask. No one was.

Knowing that Hsieh’s project aimed to speak for the elderly with dementia—and to advocate for Taiwan’s long-term care policy—I felt it a duty to participate. Watching Hsu Ching-Yue rehearse over and over under the hot lights, I knew I couldn’t retreat. Sitting there, I asked myself: what is a soul?

Hsieh once told me: “I’ve met many elderly people with dementia. They’re always smiling, seemingly happy. But those smiles are meaningless—the soul is already gone. Only the body remains.” His explanation shook me. Had my mother’s soul left long ago? Had heaven, in its mercy—or cruelty—allowed her body to stay with me while taking her essence away? I had no answer. A doctor’s X-ray showed the gap between her brain and skull widening. The folds of her hippocampus slowly flattened. If memory is gone, is the soul gone, too?

I watched her slip away piece by piece, her mind returning to her seventeen-year-old self. Speaking again in elegant Japanese, she regressed into another time, another world. She was still alive beside me—but I was already losing her. And she never looked back.

At the shoot, none of us knew our roles. Hsieh moved us like chess pieces—calm, confident, rehearsing each shot again and again. He adjusted our bodies, our pace, the flow. His attention to detail was astonishing. The costumes he designed—white caps, short capes, flowing skirts—resembled angels in religious paintings. A group of elders over sixty, dressed alike, looked almost holy.

Each shoot took thirty to forty minutes. It felt like we were hovering—not standing—on the white backdrop. No shadows. No context. No weight. Just twelve figures in white, gliding through an imagined void. This was Hsieh’s parallel universe.

His aim was not only to portray dementia, but to meditate on aging and mortality. As Taiwan enters an aging society, and as he himself grows older, Hsieh remains an artist of social conscience. Back in 1992, when I directed the DPP’s publicity department, I invited him to design campaign posters for the “Elderly Pension” initiative. He created one image of a baby symbolizing the future, and another of an elderly face representing social neglect. The posters made a significant impact. Our friendship began there.

Now, by inviting writers and scholars to embody early aging, he reconnects art with historical memory. We—those who lived through Taiwan’s turbulence—stand together in stillness. No hierarchy. No ranking. In Hsieh’s parallel universe, all souls are equal.

His aesthetic is an act of liberation. In the clean, weightless world he conjures, there is no fear—not of age, not of forgetting, not of death. His angels are free of memory, and thus free of suffering. They drift between worlds, emptied of time and history, unburdened by emotion.

Hsieh’s vision is not just about Alzheimer’s. It is about how we remember, and what it means to forget. Memory is the soul’s home. To forget is to relinquish meaning—and perhaps, paradoxically, to be free.

Through Brave the World, I have come to terms with my mother’s death. She may have lost all memory, but perhaps that too was a form of happiness. In forgetting, she was released. Through Hsieh’s art, I learned to let go.