By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN
When Liu Hsing-Yu asked his parents to swap wedding outfits and be photographed among a sea of plastic roses, he didn’t realize he’d be embarking on a 17-year-long (and counting) body of work.
In 2009, he was studying for his art degree and had recently come out to them as a gay man — both of which they struggled to understand. In fact, as he recalled from his home in Taiwan, they initially thought that the former had caused the latter. At the time, Taiwan was still a decade away from legalizing same-sex marriage.
Liu had the idea to subvert his parents’ roles after finding his father’s wedding suit from 1984. Given their traditional beliefs around gender and families, he was surprised when his mother said yes. His father took more persuading, but he eventually agreed, too.
The resulting portrait was one of the first images in Liu’s series “My Parents,” which he has exhibited numerous times over the years, including the latest presentation at the UK’s Bristol Photo Festival, which opened recently. He is also publishing a book of the photographs.
In the reimagined wedding portrait, his mother appears in his father’s suit and his father wears a secondhand wedding dress. They pose on their family’s farmlands, where Liu’s grandfather once grew taros, rice and mangoes. It’s near Taiwan’s southern port city of Kaohsiung, where Liu was born.
“The relationships between these objects and the place were important to me,” he explained. “The farmland and the truck are connected to work and physical labor. The wedding dress and suit carry ideas about marriage and how men and women are expected to behave. Putting them together in one image made these familiar things feel slightly out of place.”
At the time, his father, a truck driver, was nearing retirement and anxious about the transition. His mother was planning to find new work to support the family. Through their poses, with his father resting and his mother assuming a more assertive role, Liu wanted to reflect their changing dynamic. He thought about how gender roles inform our everyday responsibilities: “Who should earn money, who should provide care and who is allowed to show vulnerability?” he said.
Together, the photographer and his parents collected the artificial roses used in the photograph from wedding banquets they had recently attended, and Liu said the faux blooms represented some of the feelings he was grappling with.
“I imagined myself as one of those plastic flowers: perhaps beautiful, but with no roots in the soil,” he described. “I could have a place at a wedding banquet, yet I felt unable to fulfill the traditional expectations of marriage, having children and carrying on the family line. For me, the flowers hold that tension I felt as a gay man facing my family’s expectations at the time.”
Across “My Parents,” Liu explores ideas around companionship, intimacy, aging, gender expectations and cultural norms. In the beginning, Liu said each photograph could take months of discussion and conflict. For a long time, he didn’t know exactly why his father had agreed to take part in the work. His mother’s reasoning was more straightforward — she loved the besuited Taiwanese singer Fong Fei-fei and it was an opportunity to emulate her. But in 2014, when Liu invited his parents to speak alongside him during an artist talk, he was moved by his father’s words: He felt that wearing a wedding dress was a “low price” to pay to support his son, Liu recalled.
“I do not assume that agreeing to be photographed means they accept all my ideas. But their willingness to make something with me means a great deal,” he said.
Their differences have also influenced how he views art-making. “(My) participants have their own views of the work, which may differ from mine,” he said. “We can make a photograph together and gradually build understanding through that process.”
Since he began making the work, life has changed for Taiwan’s LGBTQ community. Same-sex marriage was legalized in 2019, and the social climate, in turn, has become more accepting, though there are still generational differences, Liu said. Collaborating with his parents over such a long period has fundamentally changed their relationship as well. Today, Liu is married and all four of them live together (in Taiwan, like much of Asia, it is common for newlywed couples to live with one partner’s parents). He has begun traveling with his parents for the series as well, taking them to Thailand to celebrate Songkran, the water festival marking the New Year in the Theravada Buddhist calendar. Last year, they also joined him for two weeks during his artist residency in Kumamoto, Japan.
He hopes that his work “encourages people to look again at images of family that have become so familiar that we no longer question them,” he said. As his parents age, he has thought more about care and the wellbeing of older LGBTQ people.
“I hope discussions of gender equality can also address how we grow old, who cares for us, and whether we can live freely with the people we love,” he said. “To me, these are very tangible aspects of everyday life.”
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