Yeh Wei-Li (1971–)

Yeh Wei-Li is a rare figure in Taiwanese contemporary photography whose practice is grounded in long-term inhabitation. His work emerged from a dual sense of alienation. After emigrating to the United States with his family at the age of eleven, he was repeatedly asked to explain who he was; when he returned to Taiwan at thirty, he found himself equally out of place within the local art community. This condition of never fully belonging anywhere led him to choose an indirect path—not to assert an identity, but to inscribe himself gradually into a place’s history by sorting through the old sites and objects left behind by others.

His projects therefore often begin with a relocation. Whether at Treasure Hill in Taipei or the former residence of senior artist Yeh Shih-Chiang in Shuinandong, Yeh first settles into the site. He cleans, repairs, and constructs tea rooms and workspaces, reclassifying, naming, and assigning new functions to discarded objects. Photography emerges only after this labour has accumulated to a certain point. What he photographs, therefore, is not simply a site, but a condition shaped through years of his own participation. Years of physical labour may yield only a handful of images. This seemingly absurd ratio lies at the heart of his method: the image is not a record, but what remains after the labour.

Underlying this approach is the concept of the palimpsest. Because parchment was costly in the Middle Ages, it was repeatedly scraped clean and written over, yet traces of the earlier text would remain faintly visible, allowing old and new layers to coexist. Yeh applies this idea to place: a site is never defined solely by its geographical boundaries, but is layered through successive periods of use, abandonment, and reuse. No single layer can be regarded as the “original version.” His task is to add his own layer honestly to those that already exist.

His photography therefore never aspires to objectivity. His images frequently contain objects he has constructed, arrangements he has staged, and friends he has invited to appear before the camera. The boundary between fiction and documentation is kept deliberately ambiguous: if there is no original version to restore, photography need not pretend to stand outside what it depicts.

In his more recent projects, literature has become a new interface. Beginning with specific texts, Yeh allows the experience of reading and the act of photographing to permeate one another, subjecting the memory of a place to yet another act of rewriting. Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick Modiano is among the writers he most admires. Modiano’s novels—which often begin with an old photograph or address and trace an almost vanished past through the city—resonate profoundly with Yeh’s own working method.

Born in Taipei in 1971, Yeh received a BFA in Photography from the University of South Florida in 1994 and an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. His significance lies in the third path he introduced at a time when Taiwanese photography was largely divided between documentary and conceptual approaches. By making life, labour, and time the preparatory conditions of photography, Yeh transforms the image into the product of a relationship rather than the result of observation.

His works have been presented at the 2016 Taipei Biennial, the Shanghai Biennale, Art Basel Hong Kong, and Ygrec Art Center in Paris, and are held in institutional collections including that of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. In 2023, Rizzoli published the English-language monograph Constellations: Yeh Shih-Chiang | Yeh Wei-Li, featuring essays by international art theorist Boris Groys and curator Johnson Chang.