Photography

Roger Boyce explores through lucid, evocative prose the photographic still lifes of New Zealand artist Fiona Pardington. Casting an eye back across the history of painting, Boyce addresses the rich pathos of Pardington’s photography and its visually arresting forms. He describes in them an audacious “through a glass darkly” veneration of things and their inviolable circumstance, an amor fati.

Yao Jui-Chung is one of Taiwan’s most prolific and esteemed contemporary artists. In 2020, White Fungus editor Ron Hanson interviewed Yao for a major profile on the occasion of the artist’s mid-career retrospective, Republic of Cynic, at C-LAB in Taipei. The feature was to be published in a new online Japanese art magazine commissioned by a Tokyo art collector. After the project was aborted due to a clash over the publication’s title, this profile sat dormant in our archives for almost four years. It has now been published for the first time.

Taiwan-based independent arts magazine White Fungus returns to print for the first time since the pandemic with the release of its 17th issue. The new issue is available for purchase now at the White Fungus online shop.

Noise music in Taiwan emerged in the 1990s, a tumultuous period of social upheaval following the lifting of 38 years of martial law. In the frenzied atmosphere of street clashes and political demonstrations, artists explored previously taboo subjects and experimented with radical forms. It was in this context that Taiwan's noise movement was born. Jeph Lo witnessed the evolution and reflects on that messy but protean time. His article is accompanied by photographs of political demonstrations of the period by Leon Tsai and Tsai Ming-Te.

In this series of wide-angle polaroids, Yao Jui-Chung photographs Madou Temple's animatronic religious display and other similar depictions of hell from throughout Taiwan and Singapore.

Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographs of the last days of the Chinese Civil War were exhibited at Taipei Fine Arts Museum in late 2020. The exhibition was scheduled to be held in Beijing in 2021 but was canceled due to COVID-19. David Frazier writes about the exhibition and its complicated surrounding context.