QUO YING-SHEN

Quo Ying-sheng’s photographic career began with documentary photography focusing on impressions of native Taiwan, and later shifted to travel-oriented imagery photography, seeking new colors, forms, and mental images. For him, travel is not only a cleansing and a ritual, but also a barrier separating the past and the future, and a medium for obtaining new energy. He believes that the scenes and people in his works seem to have been waiting for him, and he simply brought them back when the time was right.

The atmosphere of loneliness and solitude was an emotion that lingered from his childhood, and it is also the source of his creativity. As a representative figure of “mental imagery photography,” his works not only capture the flow of light and shadow but also deeply depict the inner loneliness and keen perception of the world.

He abandoned the traditional photographic mode of focusing on people, and instead turned his lens to natural light and shadow and surrounding still objects. These seemingly ordinary things, under his lens, exude a unique charm full of nihilism, becoming the only existence that accompanies his lonely soul. Viewers, through his works, seem to enter a world intertwined with multiple senses. Paris, Taipei, Kyoto, Venice—these cities, under his lens, are no longer mere geographical labels, but memory containers that carry breeze, humidity, scent, sound, emotions, and time. Each work is a moment of condensed time, an eternal aura.

Quo Ying-sheng has received the Ministry of Education’s Literary and Artistic Creation Award, the National Literary and Artistic Creation Award, and the National Cultural and Artistic Award, among others.

His photographic works have received international recognition and are collected by many important domestic and international institutions, including the National Library of France, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the French Ministry of Culture, M+ Museum, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Museum of Taiwan History.