Before the Forgetting

This is a photographic series that offers a focused gaze into the traditional weaving craft of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples. The subject is a Seediq woman artisan whose weaving journey has spanned over 25 years. Through the interaction between her body and the loom, she enacts a long-standing and ongoing cultural practice—one that becomes a site where collective history and personal identity converge. Weaving, for her, is not merely the continuation of a domestic skill, but a profound way of understanding selfhood, ethnic belonging, and the passage of time. Within these images, culture is remembered, reborn, and sustained through her labor. Every movement, every rhythmic step of her foot on the loom's pedal, becomes a response to the ancestral call. These photographs also reveal the pressing challenges faced by this traditional practice: the rupture across generations, the accelerating forces of modernization, and the weight of solitude borne by those who carry the responsibility of cultural preservation. Through the lens, viewers encounter a resilient voice emerging from the margins—a visual response to the question: how does one remember history with the body, before it disappears into oblivion.