Negative: The World Is Beautiful

translated from “Above Flames” by Yu, Ming-Yi

Occasionally, when students enter my office, they ask about that photo’s backstory.

I have to rewind time to my younger days, back when I was as old as they are now. During that time, I was deeply enamored with solitary, free-spirited wanderings and the idea of “seeing.” I would take local trains to faraway places, only to sit on the platform for hours, simply watching different people board and alight from trains. Sometimes, I’d walk along the small paths by the tracks from one station to another, or else navigate maze-like alleys in cities and towns, carefully avoiding main roads as if they harbored tigers. My only companion back then was a camera.

Back then, my photo album was filled with pictures of places I haven’t had the chance to revisit. One such place was Mituo. Even though Taiwan is such a small island, it contains places like Mituo—a small, emotionally understated town that seems destined to be forgotten by the world. The town clock had stopped, with no one around to wind it again.

In fact, my memories of Mituo have almost completely faded; only a few photos remain. They capture a bright afternoon when I wandered in front of a small temple hosting a glove puppet show. (I can’t even remember what temple it was.) The “stage” was quite humble—just a small van with a side-mounted backdrop. There were only two performers, with a recorded tape replacing the traditional music. The backdrop had “Chen Jinlong Puppet Troupe” written on it, along with “Mituo,” marking it as a local act. In front of the small truck, the audience consisted of just three young children, two boys and one girl. The little girl and the chubby boy weren’t paying any attention to the puppet show; instead, they were more curious about me and the camera in my hands. After spotting me, they came over to talk, completely ignoring the performance. Only the third boy continued watching the show, standing on a flowerbed with his hands behind his back, deliberately ignoring me. I let the chubby boy and the little girl look through my camera’s viewfinder, and they pressed their faces close, eyes wide with wonder, asking if they could “click it once.”

The boy watching the show must have overheard our conversation. He kept his back to us but would occasionally glance our way, stealing glances with the corners of his eyes. And when I aimed the camera at him, he deliberately turned his head away, as if defiantly ignoring me and his friends. I took photos of the little girl, the chubby boy, and the puppet show van, and I captured the back of the boy pretending to watch the show. Then I let the girl and the chubby boy each take a picture, and both chose to photograph their friend who had turned away.

I didn’t quite understand what those photos meant to me, nor could I identify the origin of my emotions toward them. But one day, some students visiting my office noticed that photo and mentioned how much they loved glove puppet shows. Nowadays, the popular type on television is the “Pili Puppet Theater,” a genre that far surpasses the older “Golden Light” era in terms of special effects and sound. The performances have mostly moved off makeshift stages; perhaps we could even call this the “cinematic age” of glove puppetry. I tried to watch a few episodes myself but found it impossible to connect with that world. As a former fan of glove puppetry, I found myself rejected by the “new puppet theater,” or perhaps it was I who refused to enter. Sometimes I try to recall the scenes performed by the “Chen Jinlong Puppet Troupe” that day. Was it a traditional play, a historical drama, or a wuxia performance? I can’t remember any details. Those memories have become like a sword with a ghostly glimmer, occasionally flickering, yet devoid of its enchanting colors.

Then, one day, I suddenly felt curious about the “Chen Jinlong Puppet Troupe,” which I had never wondered about in all these years. So, I drew on my academic training, starting to research puppet shows, hoping to uncover something about the “Chen Jinlong Puppet Troupe.” Finally, I found mention of it in a paper titled “An Initial Exploration of the Ecology and Evolution of Glove Puppet Troupes in Kaohsiung,” written by Professor Shih Guangsheng and included in the “1999 Traditional Arts Symposium Proceedings.” In the appendix, it noted that the Chen Jinlong Troupe was founded in 1950 under the original name “Golden Continent Garden.” The troupe leader, Chen Jinlong, also had a younger brother named Chen Jinxiong, whose troupe was called “Ru Zhen Garden.”

Professor Shih also compared the official records from 1960 and found that out of the 30 registered glove puppet troupes in Kaohsiung County at the time, only seven were still active. Most of the older troupes had already closed down, changed professions, renamed, or relocated. So, for me to have witnessed a performance by the Chen Jinlong Puppet Troupe in the 1990s likely made me one of the last outdoor audiences of this troupe. Even more thrilling for me was the discovery that Chen Jinlong’s mentor was none other than Hong Wenxuan. To most glove puppet fans in Taiwan, Hong Wenxuan is a familiar name. He was a master of glove puppetry and the founder of the “Wuzhou Cultural Garden.” Chen Jinlong formed his troupe during the golden age of glove puppetry, and he even performed “indoor theater” (that is, performances held on stages in movie theaters or television studios). “Wuzhou” had once been an essential troupe that comforted countless audiences from Taiwan’s grassroots, yet now few remember it.

According to Chen Jinxiong, head of the “Ru Zhen Garden” troupe, he used to perform mostly traditional stories, with his orchestra once numbering up to nine musicians. But over time, these classical stories were gradually replaced by wuxia (martial arts) dramas with puppets performing flips and rapid action sequences. The orchestra also began using records as accompaniment. Eventually, even the wuxia dramas lost popularity, and the masters almost all switched to performing “Golden Light” dramas. For many troupes, only a few opportunities remained to perform on outdoor stages for temple festivities.

Suddenly, I understood the meaning of that photo I took during that idle moment in time. That year, young me and those three children watched one of the finest students of Hong Wenxuan, Master Chen Jinlong, in what was nearly a sunset performance of glove puppetry. Though the dialogue, skills, and story of that performance have all but vanished from my memory, the photo became more than just an image—it became a latent seed, existing to someday call me back, to stir the warmth of discovering a lost memory as I searched for the Chen Jinlong Puppet Troupe. I felt a sense of indescribable satisfaction, grateful for this small episode in my life and for this single clue left behind.

I have always believed that every photo has a purpose, just as each living being has evolved with a unique ecological niche and dignity, whether it be blue-green algae, a right whale, or a forsythia flower. We may not see it or may not care, yet every life form has meaning. But not every piece of coal in the earth can become a diamond. For a photo to be remembered, it must hold something deeper beyond its physical existence.

From a neuroscientist’s perspective, a photographer’s awareness of new things and phenomena in streets or forests may implicitly relate to survival needs. As a species without claws and not particularly strong, our most resilient, agile, and imaginative weapon is our “brain.” Anyone who has raised a cat knows how kittens train their hunting skills—those claws—during their childhood, as they endlessly leap and swipe in empty rooms, seemingly conjuring up an invisible foe. And humans? We spend nearly all our childhood honing our brains.

Humans evolved on open plains and sparse woodlands, in an environment where prey or predators could appear at any moment, subjected to the tests of natural selection and sexual selection. Evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides has pointed out that, to cope with such a competitive environment, the human brain developed modules to handle both conscious and unconscious mental activities—modules for hunting, gathering, food storage, mate-seeking, cooperation with kin, and avoiding predators. Other animals’ brains operate similarly, though in today’s modern society, the modules in the human brain have become more varied and often even bizarre. Human social dynamics—cooperation and deception—are incomprehensibly complex compared to other creatures, and the brain’s content is ever-changing. The human brain has about 100 billion neurons, with each neuron on average connecting to around a thousand others, resulting in 100 trillion synaptic connections. The sensitivity of these neuron connections and the activity of the cerebral cortex rely on constant stimulation to confront new situations and develop appropriate response modules.

Imagine we enter a new city as if our ancestors had stepped into a new forest. Streets dotted with all kinds of signs are like forest paths infused with various scents and visual signals. This anxiety and thrill in the face of new environments is something many street photographers and nature photographers are likely familiar with. We might think of it this way: for photographers with cameras, the forest is like one type of street, while the street is like another kind of forest.

Street photography isn’t just about capturing people and events; it’s about capturing the environment. People exist at the edges of trickling rain, sunlight, wind, mist, lightning, and the shadows of trees and night. They live amid street signs, shops, lattes in mugs, and the flashing glow of neon lights. Sometimes, when entering dirty, cluttered, old, and somewhat sleazy buildings with a camera, one finds a refined breath of life, like a lover leaving a message on glass with their breath. Passing beneath streetlights, pedestrian overpasses, and neatly pruned sidewalk trees, you might even catch a whiff of tombstone stonework. I often walk ten hours in a city, sometimes even through the entire night, and I sometimes wonder if my fascination with wandering stems from an addiction that stimulates my brain’s curiosity—wandering has become both proof of my existence and my reason for living.

And during these walks, my mind is not a blank slate; it sometimes brings forth the smells of childhood lunch breaks—an aroma that came from fifty kids’ lunches all mixed together. A summer breeze brushes my forearms, and a novel rises from the depths of my consciousness like an island surfacing. The sound of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” and Chopin’s “Nocturne” alternately play in my mind. At a corner, a youthful kiss overlaps with a kiss I witness now. If I think about it carefully, I realize that a photo captured on the street is never just the instant of pressing the shutter; it’s an ongoing narrative, an interwoven story, a stream of consciousness and montage. Memory experts would tell you that a photo evokes “episodic memory”—perhaps unique to humans, involving a form of memory rich in self-awareness and complex experience.

My first encounter with the concept of “sauntering” came from Thoreau. In his writings, he mentioned that in his lifetime, he had met only one or two people who truly understood the “art of sauntering.” He tried to trace the etymology of the word, suggesting it originated from the Middle Ages when idle wanderers in the countryside would beg for alms under the pretense of making a pilgrimage. Children would mock these people, shouting, “Here comes a Sainte-Terrer” (a pilgrim), which gradually became “Saunterer.” Over time, the saunterer became a true pilgrim. Another interpretation is that “saunter” comes from “sans terre,” meaning “without land” or “without a home.” Saunterers are homeless, or, you could say, they consider the world their home.

In my youth, I held Thoreau’s philosophy on sauntering as gospel. He wrote that a true saunterer must walk for four hours a day with leisure, freedom, and independence. I clung to these beliefs until I began teaching, and gradually, these three qualities drifted away from me. Now, all I have left is the act of walking itself, and the photos I took while wandering in my youth.

Despite the passage of time, sometimes when I look at a particular photo, the excitement and tension from the moment of capturing it come flooding back. For instance, in Penghu, when I pointed my camera at a traditional coral stone house, I noticed a little girl in the frame just turning to look at the camera, and on the other side, a kitten in the window turning as well. Their gazes, sharp and filled with emotion, softened me. Another time, at the abandoned old station in Gangshan, I found that the day before, a mirror used by countless travelers to fix their appearance had been left intact in the station but was now broken. Standing before the mirror, I recalled an incident from childhood when I broke a similar mirror in our home, one meant for guests to use while putting on their shoes. At that moment, a student in military uniform walked across the railway bridge. I raised my camera, waiting for him to pass by the window, waiting for his shadow to disrupt the spatial order and transform into a photograph.

These photos still retain the vigor that stimulated my cerebral cortex back then. The episodic memories from when I took those photos, as well as the new episodic memories evoked over years of repeatedly viewing them, wash over me like waves, inspiring me.

In fact, the term “snapshot” originally had the connotations of suddenness, of a quick snatch or bite. It captures a single instant in time, one that emerges from both unconscious and conscious thought. A moment earlier, we were immersed in what psychologists refer to as “deep play,” where we aren’t merely “waiting” for the decisive moment in a void but are engaged in deep play. We wait amid active neurons and self-dialogue within the prefrontal cortex, ready for the ambush of a photograph in our wandering.

Sidney Perkowitz, an American physicist and science writer, once described the connection between the properties of light and the combined workings of the eye and mind: “The ability to maintain high flexibility in an ever-changing visual environment is a distinctive feature of the eye and mind working together, enabling them to frame the flood of information brought by light into patterns. Take a look at a plain piece of paper: outside, whether in the slightly yellowish midday sunlight or the dimmer, reddish light of dusk, the paper appears white; indoors, even under lighting a hundred times weaker than daylight and possibly tinted blue or red, the paper still appears white. Yet if you photograph the paper in the early morning or at dusk, it will display a rosy hue and other variations; your visual processing adjusts for these differences, but a camera does not. A camera faithfully captures the scene as it is, while the brain and eye function like a camera with color correction and autofocus, constantly seeking targets.” This captures the universal struggle photographers face with this beautiful world; our photos often differ from our imagination. And because of this, a photographer who can fully express what the brain and eyes perceive in the world is truly precious.

To a materialist, this beautiful world is an objective reality; to an idealist, it is exactly the opposite. But they are each only half correct. Only scientists like Perkowitz truly understand that humans perceive the world through their senses and then, with a brain shaped by evolution and imbued with culture, create a “beautiful world” that exists solely in the mind.

Ridley Scott’s classic film Blade Runner, adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was once a dream-maker for me. The story unfolds in an era where humans employ AI robots to undertake space missions. These replicants are so real, indistinguishable from humans, that people can’t tell them apart. They are implanted with memories, yet lack emotional responses and empathy. To prevent rebellion or malfunctions, their lifespans are limited to a mere four years.

Following a violent replicant rebellion, a group of sixth-generation replicants comes to Earth and is declared illegal. A special police unit called the “Blade Runners” is tasked with hunting down these fugitive replicants on Earth and “retiring” them. A semi-retired Blade Runner, Rick Deckard, takes on the mission, but he becomes increasingly conflicted as the replicants appear more human. He starts feeling as if “retiring” replicants is akin to killing real people. What drew me to this film was how the replicants, initially only “almost human,” gradually develop self-awareness and emotions as the implanted memories are layered with new ones. The replicants are filled with feeling, while humans appear cold and emotionless, living in cities deteriorated to the state of ruins and shrouded in severe pollution.

Roy, a replicant played by Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, possesses memories of witnessing beauty on Earth and Mars. Part of his desire to escape is the fear that, upon “retirement,” he will lose this beautiful world within his heart. In his final moments, he recites an iconic, poetic monologue: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” This is a statement of episodic memory, a shared creation of science fiction writers and filmmakers—a vision of the cosmos. When Blade Runner was released in 1982, even if we could look up at Orion, 430 light-years away from Earth, it was hard to imagine that one day spaceships would pass by it. Yet this group of creators had somehow already glimpsed it.

For a time, I was sometimes afraid that my photos were “meaningless”—like orchids blooming in a remote mountain, blooming and fading without ever impacting the world. On the other hand, I feared they were “meaningful,” but would one day be discovered only after they had faded away. Like every photographer’s contradictory emotions, I’m acutely aware of my mere decades of life yet use storage boxes, archival paper that claims to last a century without fading, and acid-free sleeves for the negatives to extend their longevity. We hope these photos will outlast us—are we trying to foretell something, to tell future generations what happened? Occasionally, there’s a neglected photo that fades, its silver particles falling away, molded to the point of being unrecognizable, yet I still can’t bear to discard it. Traditional silver-based photographs degrade over time in a process much like memory. Long-term memories are stored throughout the brain, so you don’t suddenly forget something; instead, over time, the precision, intensity, clarity, and details fade, like a photograph printed on glass, blurred by each exhaled breath upon it. And yet we still want to preserve these remnants, as if we deeply believe that everything still exists within them.

This brings to mind something Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama once said: “I think that regardless of the era, we always feel uncertain, but as a photographer, I know what I need to do—to take photos every day. And that’s all there is to it. In this regard, I am very straightforward. Though my photography may not change the world, if I were to stop taking photos, I would no longer even see myself.” What I truly fear may be that, in life, I would no longer be able to see even myself.

Since I began teaching at Dong Hwa University in 2003, I have always had the photo of the little girl and chubby boy facing me, with the puppet show on the small truck busily performing in the background, posted outside my office door. Nearly twenty years have passed since the time captured in that photo, and it has been outside my office for a decade now. With no protective measures, it has blurred over time, eroded by the years. Many students notice it as they knock on my door, and occasionally someone asks about it, and so I begin my story with, “When I was young, I loved the solitary act of wandering.” I talk about the two kids in that photo, about the other child in another picture, about the moment of the “Chen Jinlong Puppet Troupe” performance, and the little town painted on the puppet stage that I never returned to—“Mituo.” There are things I leave out, like the memory of when my brother and I tied handkerchiefs around our fingers and performed puppet shows in front of the hallway windows. I leave out how we saved up tens of thousands of dollars to buy a few puppets from a shop clerk (whose family happened to be in a puppet troupe), and how they later became models for my college graduation project advertisements. I still remember that it was the most bewildering year of my life (facing the question of work and what kind of life I wanted to lead). Even after all these years, that photo gives me an emotional anchor, like a flag planted on the lonely ice fields of Antarctica.

To this day, I don’t know what kind of future life will rush up from behind. But every time I open these photos, I see the past unfurl before me, overwhelming me, guiding me, shaking me, questioning why I gave up independence, leisure, and freedom. This perhaps explains why I took the photos back then and why I now keep these images that may mean little to anyone else. This beautiful world—whether it exists in the past, the present, or the future, whether it is real or my own fabrication—draws me toward it with longing and sorrow.