Crossing Boundaries Through Shifting Times and Changing Societies

Born in 1949 in a rural village in Taichung, Taiwan, Hsieh Chun-Te left vocational high school at sixteen, determined to become a painter. What began as street sketching to hone his drawing skills led him unexpectedly into the world of photography. At seventeen, his father sold farmland to purchase a camera and a 16mm movie camera for him. With these tools, Hsieh left home for Taipei.
At nineteen, he held his first solo exhibition, The Riverbed, at the Seikosha Gallery in Taipei, earning the title of “Nineteen-Year-Old Green Hand” from the inaugural issue of Photography Century.

At twenty, he was drafted and served three years in Kinmen as a military photographer, enduring artillery bombardments from across the strait. His role also required photographing executions of prisoners—experiences that left an indelible imprint of “death rituals” on his artistic consciousness, shaping the recurring themes of endings and rebirth in his later works. Returning home after military service, he found his family’s farmland consumed by urban sprawl, unable to find the road back—becoming, in his words, a self-exiled witness.
From the 1970s to the 1980s, he traveled across Taiwan’s villages and indigenous settlements for fifteen years, creating the documentary series Homeland. In the era of martial law and strict surveillance, his photographic activities often drew suspicion, resulting in interrogations and confiscated film. Despite this, Homeland—with its rich color aesthetics and poetic narrative— earned him the titles “Poet of Color” and “Poet of Images,” offering solace to a generation living through political unrest.

In 1987, Hsieh relocated to the industrial outskirts of Taipei—Sanchong and Luzhou—settling among migrant workers from Taiwan’s south. Again using “home” as his conceptual axis, he began the 24-year epic Sanchong Project, a staged photographic series chronicling the human cost of Taiwan’s rapid industrialization: families shattered by political violence, rural migrants coping with fractured kinship, sexual repression and release in ritual celebrations, and youth challenging entrenched social orders through emergent gender consciousness. Starting from hand-drawn storyboards, Hsieh assembled teams to produce images on a cinematic scale. The work culminated in RAW, presented in 2011 at the Venice Biennale as Feast of Chun-Te, combining photographic installation, spatial design, and culinary theatre.
Critics praised his audacity. Libération described it as “one of the most staggering performances in the history of the Biennale,” while curator Dominique Païni observed in his imagery “a world steeped in the atmosphere of a storm after the mistake, where the body becomes a site of punishment, humiliation, and ritual.”