Tsai Ting-Bang (b. 1999, Taiwan) is a Taiwanese artist working with photography and photobooks. Drawing from his Taiwanese and Vietnamese heritage, his work explores family history, identity, migration, and intimate relationships. Through long-term photographic projects and book-based practices, Tsai examines how personal narratives intersect with broader questions of belonging, memory, and cultural inheritance. His photobook Born from the Same Root received the First PhotoBook Award at the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and the Singapore Photo Dummy Book Award in 2024. In 2025, his project Hui Shui Dang Dang: Aunt Jin Yun, the Beautiful One received the Hasselblad Foundation Photo Book Grant.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I think the origin of my artistic practice probably comes from my family, and from a kind of inexplicable encouragement.

I grew up in rural Chiayi, Taiwan, where resources were very limited. As a child, I loved anime characters and wanted to own toys of them, but I couldn’t afford them. So I started drawing the things I couldn’t have, one by one. For me, drawing did not begin with a love of art. It was simply a way of obtaining something: if I couldn’t own it, I could draw it.

Once, when I was in kindergarten, our teacher asked us to draw our “family.” I secretly drew a family with both my mother and father in it. My parents had already divorced by then. When I was six, I was sent from Taoyuan to rural Chiayi to live with my grandmother. What I wanted to draw was not the family I actually had, but the family I remembered—or perhaps the family I wished I had.

The teacher praised the drawing in front of the entire class, and that moment changed something in me. What had started as drawing in order to obtain things gradually became something else: “I want more people to see me and praise me, so I need to draw more and draw better.”

My older brother, Hsien, was also a major influence on me. He was my rival in drawing from a very young age. He could naturally create complete images with strong narratives, while I would often lose interest halfway through a drawing. I always wanted to beat him, and it was through this competition and jealousy that I first realized I wanted to become an artist.

Later, I moved from drawing into filmmaking. In my mid-teens, I began watching a huge amount of cinema and auditing university courses in philosophy, psychology, and film. At 17, I made my first short film, and later I raised the money myself to make another film about sexual anxiety and growing up. At the time, I believed deeply in cinema. I even imagined that I might win at Cannes or the Golden Horse Awards. In the end, the film was not selected for anything.

That failure made me rethink my approach. Perhaps art should not simply be about throwing the deepest parts of myself out into the world. Perhaps I needed to find a way for the work to genuinely connect with other people.

When I was 19, I happened to encounter Miyako Ishiuchi’s photographs of her mother’s belongings. She did not photograph her mother directly. Instead, through objects such as lipstick and clothing, she allowed someone who was absent from the frame to reappear. For the first time, I realized that the people around me could themselves become the source of my work.

So I put filmmaking aside, began photographing my mother, and gradually moved toward photography.

What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your work?

My work often begins with family relationships, but what I am really interested in is not simply “family” itself. I am interested in the complicated relationships of dependence, distance, power, and exchange between people.

I have always felt that family is a strange place. You may desperately need its recognition while also wanting to leave it; you can love someone deeply while simultaneously feeling resentment toward them. My own family has experienced divorce, migration, remarriage, long periods of separation, and reunification. Because of this, “home” has never been a stable concept for me.

In Mother and Father, I photographed the everyday life of my mother and stepfather. I later realized that perhaps the reason I was able to press the shutter was precisely because there was a certain distance between me and my family. I grew up constantly leaving, returning, leaving again, and returning again. I was close to them, but at the same time, I always felt like an outsider observing them.

Born from the Same Root came from my relationship with my older brother, Hsien. We grew up together and look very similar, yet we gradually ended up taking completely different paths in life. Through family albums, old photographs, and contemporary images, I tried to look at how two people who came from the same root could grow into very different states of being.

In my recent project about my mother, I have begun to think more directly about the act of looking itself. I used to believe that I was trying to understand my mother and preserve a record of her life. But later, I realized that perhaps I was also approaching her simply because she was a good subject for my work.

I started asking myself: If someone could not become part of my artwork, would I still want to be close to them?

So for me, photography is no longer only about family. It is also a way of thinking about the relationship between the artist and the person being photographed, and whether artistic practice itself is also a form of power and exchange.

How do your personal experiences and identity influence your art?

My personal experiences almost directly constitute my artistic practice.

I grew up in a Taiwanese-Vietnamese family formed through a transnational marriage. My father was Taiwanese and my mother is Vietnamese. When I was young, my parents divorced and I was sent to the countryside in Taiwan to live with my grandmother. When I was 12, my father died of liver cancer, and my brother and I eventually returned to live with our mother. Later, my mother took us to Vietnam, and I left the conventional education system at a very young age, constantly moving between Taiwan and Vietnam.

Because of this, I have always existed in a kind of “in-between” state. I am part of my family, but I often feel like an outsider within it. I am familiar with both Taiwan and Vietnam, but I have never felt that I completely belong to either one.

This experience has made it natural for me to turn the people around me into subjects. My mother, brother, stepfather, and younger siblings are not people I deliberately went looking for as artistic subjects. They are simply the people who have always been part of my life.

But as my practice became more developed, I also began to question my own position.

My mother once told me that I was the child in the family who was most willing to listen to her and understand her. But I have never told her that, many times, the reason I approached her was because I was working on a book, an exhibition, or needed more material for my work.

That made me ask myself: Am I photographing my family simply because I love them? Or because their lives can become my art?

This question has now become an important part of my practice. My identity is not only that of a “son within a family,” but also that of someone who observes his family. I am constantly moving between these two positions.

How do you approach exhibiting your work? What are your goals when showing your art in public spaces?

First of all, I need to feel something myself. I am only interested in creating work when something genuinely affects me.

I also think of myself as someone who comes from cinema, so when I present my work publicly—whether through a book or an exhibition—I tend to approach it through forms of storytelling that people can recognize and enter into. I want to gradually bring the audience into the world I am trying to describe, rather than expecting them to immediately understand everything.

Ideally, I want people to feel something when they encounter my work. I want them to laugh, to feel happy, or even to cry. For me, creating a sense of emotion and resonance is one of the most important things an artwork can do.

What advice would you give to emerging artists trying to establish themselves?

Do nothing sometimes. I think having time to simply waste time is important, and I believe it is important for everyone.

Being bored, having empty time, and allowing your mind to wander can give your brain space to breathe. You may find ideas more easily when you are not constantly filling every moment with something. Don’t pack your life too full.

At the same time, I think the art world is extremely saturated today, which makes it very difficult to be seen. Artists need to learn how to market and present themselves.

There is a common image of the artist as someone who exists above ordinary life, almost completely detached from the world. I don’t really believe in that anymore. I think artists today need to understand how to communicate and promote their work.

In the past, perhaps appearing in a magazine was enough to make people notice you. Today, people’s attention is spread across so many different places. That is why I think it is important to apply to international open calls, continuously meet and connect with people, and use social media to let people know that you and your work exist.

Making art is important, but learning how to let people encounter that art is also part of being an artist today.

What projects are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?

At the moment, I am developing a long-term photography project about my mother.

When I photographed my mother in the past, I approached her from a relatively distant perspective. I wanted to photograph her as a Vietnamese woman, a woman in a transnational marriage, and someone living between Taiwan and Vietnam, and to explore how she found her position within the power structures of family and society.

This time, however, I want to look at her again from the perspective of a son.

I have started collecting her photographs from when she was young, family albums, historical documents, and newspaper archives in order to reconstruct and understand her life. She was born in Vietnam in 1976 and lived through the social changes following the Vietnam War, the period of economic reform, and changes in women’s labor. In 1996, she became a Vietnamese bride and married a Taiwanese man, moving to Taiwan.

When I began looking at photographs of her when she was young, I realized for the first time that I had never really seen her as a “woman.” I had only seen her as my mother.

Now I am trying to see her as a woman, a migrant, a daughter, a wife, a mother, and a person who has continuously tried to find a better way to live.

But the more I photograph her, the more I realize how similar we actually are.

She places “interest” in money, while I may place it in being seen, artistic achievement, and recognition. She believes that meeting wealthy people can change her life, while I may also be using the people around me to change my own position by turning them into art.

So this project is ultimately not only about my mother. It has also become a way of looking at myself.

I don’t know what answer I will eventually find. Perhaps that uncertainty is what interests me most right now.

When I think I am photographing my family, am I actually photographing them—or am I photographing myself?

Text and photo courtesy of Tsai Ting-Bang

Website: https://rootphotobook1174.wixsite.com/bang
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tsaitingbang/