Becoming・Taiwanese

Becoming・Taiwanese is a photobook by Taiwanese photographer TSAO Liang-Pin about Taiwan's Martyrs' Shrines, national memorial sites that were often built on the grounds of former Japanese Shinto shrines. Published by Akaaka Art Publishing in 2025, it brings together two photographic series with postcards, vernacular photographs and archival documents.

The story behind the book

Taiwan has changed rulers many times: Japanese colonial rule, war, martial law, then democratization. Each time, people there had to ask again who they are. Ten years before this book, while studying in the United States, Tsao made Sojourn, a work about a Taiwanese person alone abroad, rootless and adrift. After returning home, he began photographing the Martyrs' Shrines across Taiwan with the solemnity of memorial portraits. Later he stepped into the pictures himself.

What is in the book

• Imaginarium (from 2015): 20 Martyrs' Shrines across Taiwan, some of them former Japanese shrines, where the dead and the living, the sacred and the secular, the state and the individual meet
• As Ritual (from 2020): the photographer bows so deeply that his head disappears from view, a gesture many people learn without ever noticing
• Postcards, vernacular photographs and documents from the Japanese colonial and Kuomintang eras
• Fold-out pages that open up layers of imposed belief and expected loyalty

About TSAO Liang-Pin

Born in Hsinchu and based in Taipei, Tsao published his first photobook, Sojourn, in 2015. In 2016 he founded Lightbox Photo Library, which collects and shares Taiwanese photography, and in 2025 he founded the Taiwan International Photography Festival (TIPF). Becoming・Taiwanese is his second photobook.