shashasha

In his book "Something Vibrant," Taiwanese photographer Su Hou-Wen spent nearly ten years, from 2013 to 2023, photographing the rivers near his home.
With an open mind about the specific subjects to capture, Hou-Wen created a series that includes photographs of flora and fauna, rock formations and tree branches, people and animals, nature and artifice. While each individual shot is clean and clear—one can point to and describe each element of Hou-Wen's photographs—the series as a whole gives rise to something less tangible. In "Something Vibrant," the river is captured as a source of life and culture, always in motion, always rewriting, discarding, giving, reforming. Su Hou-Wen has captured the artifacts that emerge from these processes in compelling images.

“Driven by my cravings for a unique paradise, I was eager to be a part of the river. I had little clues about whether these being documented are people who have long lived here with legacy passing down generations, or perhaps just those that arrive to escape from city life. I wandered through it all. All these people, activities, things, and sceneries that confused or intrigued me were documented and became my metaphors to demarcate a heterogeneity of life. These life stories developed along the rivers gradually evolved into distinctive narratives, which turned into a thick web of storytelling over time, to eventually fixate me within its fluid boundaries.”
― from Su Hou-Wen’s afterword