Family Times by Annie Wang & Liu Hsing Yu

Drawing on the work of Liu Hsing Yu and Annie Wang, Family Times explores how family relationships are never fixed but continually reshaped by time, memory, care and changing social expectations. Both artists use photography to revisit intimate relationships across many years, treating time not simply as subject matter but as an active material within their practice.

In 2009, while visiting his family in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Liu Hsing Yu discovered his parents’ 1984 wedding photograph alongside the suit his father had worn for the ceremony. Recreating the image with his parents’ roles reversed—his mother in the suit and his father in a borrowed wedding dress—became the starting point for an ongoing series My Father and Mother. Liu went on to photograph his parents wearing one another’s wedding attire at the former homes of long-deceased relatives across rural Taiwan. These performative acts became a ritual through which he communicated the social transformations of contemporary Taiwan, including the legalisation of same-sex marriage and the growing visibility of LGBT+ communities, to his ancestors. At the same time, the project marked a deeply personal homecoming, allowing Liu to navigate his own coming out through a return to family history and ancestral landscape.

Annie Wang’s The Mother as a Creator (2007–present) offers a sustained meditation on motherhood over seventeen years. Each year, Wang photographs herself and her son before returning the following year to make another portrait in front of the previous image. As successive photographs accumulate, multiple moments in time collapse into a single image, producing what Wang describes as a visual “time tunnel”. Different versions of mother and child coexist, revealing motherhood not as a fixed identity but as an evolving relationship shaped by duration, intimacy and change.

Together, these two practices reveal family as both subject and method. Rather than presenting family as a stable unit, they foreground it as something continually remade through ritual, repetition and care. One work reflects on the changing relationship between parents and their child, the other on the evolving bond between mother and son. They offer complementary perspectives on kinship, identity and belonging, demonstrating how photography can make visible the slow, often imperceptible transformations that shape family life across generations. 

Biographies

Liu Hsing Yu’s work centres on themes of gender, sexuality and human relationships with ecological environments, particularly in relation to Taiwan. For Liu, photography is a participatory medium that enables collaborations with others, working together to challenge conventional perspectives. Major international presentations include Centre Pompidou Paris (2019) and Kyotographie Japan (2025), where he was the recipient of the inaugural KG+Select Award. He was also nominated for the 2018 Taipei Arts Awards. Liu holds an MFA degree from the National Kaohsiung Normal University. 

Annie Wang’s artistic practice focuses on issues of gender and the role of women within society. She has presented her work internationally, at festivals including: Images Vevey, Switzerland (2020), Daegu Photo Biennale, Korea (2021), Photo Australia (2022) and Paris Photo (2023). Her works are held in multiple permanent collections, including: the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (U.S.A), The J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, U.S.A), the George Eastman Museum (Rochester, U.S.A), Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, U.S.A), the Harry Rison Center (Austin, U.S.A), The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)  (San Francisco, U.S.A) and Tainan Museum of Art (Taiwan). She is also the director of the Cing Tien Art Space and an Assistant Professor at National Hong Dwa University (Taiwan).

In collaboration with: