HSIAO Yung-Sheng

Two brothers stand together. One in a sergeant’s uniform; the other, in plain clothes, meets the camera with a steady, searching gaze. Made under martial law, the picture holds a charged contrast — service and ordinary life, rule and possibility — without fixing who belongs inside or outside the system.
    This tension resonates with Chen Yingzhen’s short novel My Kid Brother Kangxiong — one of the Biennial’s three conceptual departure points — where a sister reads her younger brother’s diaries after his suicide, tracing how youthful ideals meet hard limits. The photograph carries that same pull: a hope for openness, and the weight of what might not change.
    Working in the late 1970s and early 1980s, HSIAO shaped social documentary with clear framing and unforced light — images that witness rather than explain, and leave room for us to think our way in.