1% Profile | Lee Kuo-min: The Taiwan Photographer Who Shoots Only What He Can't Remove

Early in our conversation,  Lee Kuo-min (李國民) stopped mid-sentence, pulled out several sheets of A4 paper, and said with a small smile, "Wait — let me check my crib sheet."

The handwriting was difficult to read, looping and compressed. But three words stood out clearly: light, time, space.

He had tried to organise his thoughts the night before — an attempt to put language around things he rarely spoke aloud. Moments later, the papers were set aside and barely looked at again. He didn't need them. Or perhaps he realised that what he wanted to say couldn't be found on paper at all.

From then on, the interview moved in the pauses he allowed himself. Long, considered silences. "Let me think," he would say — or admit, laughing softly, that a particular question was difficult. Some he answered sideways, arriving at the point from an unexpected angle. A few he left genuinely open.

He is wary of language. Once something is spoken, he believes, it becomes too fixed. Images, for him, work differently. And sitting across from him, you begin to understand that this wariness is not evasiveness — it is, in fact, the whole argument.

Lee rarely begins a project by asking what he wants. His starting point is almost always the opposite: what he does not want. "I know what I don't want," he said more than once, with the quiet confidence of someone who has tested the idea thoroughly. "That is my point of view."

It sounds like a modest claim. It is not. Over three decades, that single discipline — the sustained refusal to add, to correct, to improve — has produced a body of work that sits deliberately between architectural photography and contemporary art, belonging fully to neither, dependent on both.

Taiwan Architectural Photographer Lee Kuo-min: From Film Darkroom to Venice Biennale

In Taiwan, architectural photography has long been understood as a service: recording buildings for architects, supplying visual language for design. Lee entered the field in the 1990s through collaborations with several leading architects. His images later entered the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and the permanent collections of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.

Those credentials could easily have defined him. Instead, he kept moving — which, it turns out, is also a form of refusal.

His current exhibition at  YellowKorner takes the architecture ofI. M. Pei (貝聿銘) as its thread, moving from the Luce Memorial Chapel in Taichung to the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. The curatorial idea is that a life, like a building, is a vessel for time. For Lee, however, the real subject has never been the structure alone. It is what light becomes once it has entered a space — and what happens to the person standing inside that light.

He did not arrive at photography through fine-art ideas. He arrived through the darkroom — through failure, repetition, and the particular discipline of waiting.

In the days of film, you finished a roll and then waited. Sometimes for weeks, through developing, fixing, and printing. An entire roll could come back completely black. "Failure," he said, without drama, "is part of photography." He said it the way someone states a fact they stopped resenting long ago.

From those repeated disappointments, he learned to read light not as technical numbers — aperture, shutter speed, ISO — but as lived experience. The accumulated memory of what each setting had produced before. What the body knows, not what the manual says.

It was during this period that he began experimenting with cross-processing: treating slide film with negative chemistry, or the reverse. The results were unstable — strong colour shifts, heavy grain, heightened contrast, images that seemed to argue with themselves. Many photographers saw only mistakes. Lee recognised something else. "That era, a lot of people were doing it," he said, "in photography, in film. And the mistake, at some point, becomes a style."

He smiled when he said it — not proudly, but with the recognition of someone who has seen how the accidental and the intentional eventually change places.

Those early experiments never vanished. Decades later, they resurfaced in the series A Fool's Thirty Years (一痴三十年).

His images look quiet. But the quiet is a decision made again and again, in front of every scene he has ever photographed.

No supplementary lighting. No staged figures. No attempt to heighten drama or clarify what the available light leaves ambiguous. He accepts uneven exposure, drifting colour temperature, shadows so deep that detail disappears into them. In those imperfections, he believes, space finally begins to speak for itself.

Nowhere is this clearer than in his photographs of Pei's buildings. The light inside the Luce Memorial Chapel — carefully placed by Pei to animate the curved concrete walls — becomes something else in Lee's hands: not an architectural feature but a condition, something the viewer is briefly inside rather than looking at. At the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, he deliberately left out the building's two famous ocular windows, the image most associated with the building, the shot most photographers would have built the whole series around. Their absence opens the surrounding space rather than anchoring it. "The image no longer reproduces the building," he said. "It rewrites it."

This is subtraction as stance. The decision about what not to include is where the argument lives.

Inside Taipei's Treasure Hill: The Residency That Redefined His Practice

The most consequential shift in Lee's practice did not happen inside a gallery or a client's studio. It happened in a hillside squatter settlement in Taipei, at night, after he had spent his days somewhere else entirely.

In 2006, Lee moved into Treasure Hill (寶藏巖) as an artist-in-residence. The community was caught in a protracted dispute between preservation advocates and urban redevelopment plans — a place where the question of what would survive and what would be erased was genuinely unresolved. During the day he continued photographing luxury interiors and commercial spaces; at night he returned to Treasure Hill. The contrast, he said, gave him more than he could process at the time. "That period influenced me enormously."

But it also unlocked something older. The residency brought back a childhood memory he had never photographed — one that had stayed with him precisely because of its absence. The day his family left their military dependents' village (眷村), he had stood outside watching all their possessions piled in the open air: a lifetime of objects reduced, in an afternoon, to a meaningless heap. He was a child. He had not lifted a camera.

He paused when he told me this. "Only in memory," he said quietly.

That gap — the image that existed only inside him, with no photographic record to return to — shaped everything he did at Treasure Hill. He made a deliberate decision to go inside the homes and photograph the intimate traces of daily life: scuff marks on walls, wear patterns in bathrooms, grease above the stove, the precise distance between a bed and a table. The small densities of living that would vanish once the community changed, leaving nothing but the fact of their absence.

In a place where everyone — residents, activists, officials, developers — held a firm position, Lee chose a more ambiguous border. He asked himself, more than once, whether a photographer should be an observer or an actor. "I came to think," he said, with a slight laugh that seemed directed at the difficulty of the question rather than its answer, "the answer is both."

But his action was never loud. It was a quiet, repeated refusal: no fill light.

When others suggested brightening the darker corners — making the spaces more legible, more presentable, easier to read — he declined. Artificial light, he believed, would impose an external decision on the scene. It would make the images prettier and more coherent, but it would also change the rhythm of the space, replace its actual conditions with a tidier version of them. "My position," he said, "was simply — don't touch it."

That sentence carries more weight than it first appears. Read as a technical instruction, it means: preserve the available light, accept the imperfections, let the space be itself. Read as a civic position — inside a community fighting over whether it had the right to remain — it means something else entirely. By refusing to improve what he found, Lee preserved a state of things that had not yet been decided. The photographs did not argue for any side. They made the disappearance visible before it happened.

Photography, in that moment, became a form of silent participation. And years later, those images remain — long after the argument was settled and the space was changed.

If Treasure Hill clarified Lee's relationship to the world outside the frame, A Fool's Thirty Years turned his attention toward what was inside the camera all along.

The starting point was almost absurdly small: the unexposed leader strip at the beginning of every roll of film — the section that feeds through the camera mechanism, absorbs the first light, and is then discarded before processing. Technically, it is a non-image. Practically, it is waste. Lee began paying attention to it. "For thirty years," he said, leaning forward slightly, "I've been working inside thirty-six frames. But there is space beyond that."

What he found in that space was time made visible. Mould, chemical decay, the residue of reactions that had continued long after the shutter last closed. What had been technical failure — the kind of thing you throw away without looking — became, in his hands, subject matter.

The series title carries its own logic, compressed into three characters: Yi (一) for the film itself, the material origin of the image; Chi (痴) for the stubborn, inefficient devotion of a maker who keeps going without calculating returns; Thirty Years for the slow accumulation of technique, change, and the gradual revision of what photography means to the person practising it. The five works in the series are less pictures of the world than a structural argument: photography does not have to reproduce what is in front of the lens. It can turn inward, and find something there.

There is one image Lee kept returning to during our conversation — one he described with unusual precision, even though he could not show it.

It was taken at a simple half-open shelter by Sun Moon Lake, part of a construction project by architect Hsieh Ying-chun (謝英俊). The structure had no controlled lighting, no fixed walls, wind moving freely through. Lee set up a long exposure — three, four seconds. He was waiting, the way he always waits.

Then a cat walked into the frame and stopped exactly at the boundary between light and shadow. Lee triggered the shutter on instinct. In the seconds that followed, ambient light shifted, car headlights swept through, the whole atmosphere of the space changed. The cat, startled by the brightness, held still just long enough.

"That photograph cannot be made again," he said. Not as a boast — more like a statement of fact that he finds both humbling and clarifying. The cat will never return to the same spot. The light will never arrive from the same angle. The conditions that produced the image assembled themselves once, briefly, and then dissolved.

For Lee, that unrepeatable instant — when time, space, light, and chance converge without being arranged — is photography at its most essential. Not composition. Not intention. Conditions aligning, and a shutter opening.

What Three Decades of Photography Looks Like When It Has No Final Answer

Before we finished, I asked Lee what he hoped people took away from his work. He thought about it for longer than I expected.

"I'm not sure," he finally said. And then, after another pause: "I just want them to keep looking."

Writing about him, you eventually understand why that answer is complete. You can enter Lee Kuo-min's practice through Treasure Hill, through his re-imagining of Pei's buildings, through the material introspection of A Fool's Thirty Years, or through a single image of a cat frozen at the edge of a light-shadow line. Each path keeps extending. None arrives at a tidy conclusion.

He seems comfortable with that — more than comfortable, deliberate about it. What he places in front of the viewer is not an argument but a presence: the overlooked, the imperfect, the things that were about to disappear without anyone noticing. He noticed. He stayed. He didn't touch the light.

Whether you find what he found there is, as he might say, another matter entirely.

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