Thing．Figure．Book

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Publication Date｜2026-03-01

Authors｜Kao Chung-Li

Press｜影言社

ISBN｜978-986-96995-6-3

Synopsis

Thing · Figure · Book is the debut written work by artist Kao Chung-Li. Centered on the “political-economic dynamics of visibility,” the book interrogates how photography, since its inception, has expanded into a global “infrastructure of visibility” and “primitive accumulation of images” through technology and colonial systems.

The book assembles Kao Chung-Li’s essential essays, an interview, and creative notes from the past decade. It also includes paper-based versions and sketches of his representative series, such as Slideshow Cinema: An Autumn Afternoon and Belated Punctum: La Jetée 2. Featuring over two hundred images—some published for the first time—the volume extensively covers topics of image and perception, providing critical analyses of the history of technical images including animation, photography, cinema, and cinegratography.

Readers are invited to follow Kao Chung-Li’s singular creative trajectory in a radical investigation of our own visual spiritual history. By dismantling the violent structures of audiovisual class and power hierarchies, this book serves as an intellectual tool and a method of practice for reclaiming the sovereignty of perception.

 

Born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1958, Kao Chung-Li is an artist whose oeuvre expresses the historical dialectics and topology between perception and audiovisual technologies. By dint of artistic creation, Kao engages in media archaeology, investigates the power structures in the history of audiovisual machines, and continues his unswerving pursuit of emancipation within the present system of production. He invents and produces his own audiovisual mechanical devices, and combines them with the images, negatives, and audiovisual industrial apparatus he has collected. His approach reflects the perceptual conditions of the audiovisual on the one hand, and challenges the concepts of audiovisual technology production on the other. He won seven Golden Harvest Awards in the categories of 8mm experimental film, animation, and documentary five years in a row (1984-1988).

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