This documentary records the research and preparation process for the exhibition Man Who Captured the Landscape - Photography and Revisit of Fang Ching-Mian, held at the Chiayi Art Museum from March to August 2021. Directed by Liao Hsiu-hui, produced by Tien Zong-yuan, and filmed by So Yo-hen, the work is the result of continued collaboration within the Your Bros. Filmmaking Group. An amateur mountaineering photographer and an Indigenous resident of Taiwan’s highest peak, Yushan, Fang Ching-mian’s memories and photographs unfold through thousands of ascents and descents—layered and misaligned like the veiled strata of the mountain itself. By interpreting Fang’s images of Yushan through a nonlinear and opaque lens, the film transcends the conventions of an exhibition archive video, forming a distinct and autonomous gaze. The moments captured by the film crew as they follow Fang’s path are marked only by silence, as they attempt to fill the blank celluloid with landscape. It is only back in the darkroom—when the old glass plate negatives shot and preserved by Fang long ago are retrieved and developed—that one realizes the prevailing emotion throughout this journey was, in fact, awe.
_OH Minwook