G-Book 女子冊

G-book is a long-term project begun in Taiwan in 2016, following women across ages, bodies, identities, and stages of life. Through intimate, collaborative portraits, it traces how time, memory, care, and choice become visible through the body.

G-book is an ongoing photographic project I began in Taiwan in 2016. The “G” stands for “girls,” while its Chinese title, 女子冊, can be understood as a book of women. Through portraits, intimate encounters, and images made over many years, the project follows women of different ages, bodies, professions, identities, and stages of life. Its central subject is time: how it enters the body, leaves evidence, and shapes the ways a person continues to become herself. Being perfect is unnecessary.

The project began without a fixed conclusion. I kept returning to women because of something I first learned from my mother. She has lived through many difficulties with gentleness and quiet strength, teaching me that strength does not always appear as confrontation or heroism. Sometimes it is found in caring, waiting, enduring, and continuing to live. I have not yet photographed her; she remains too singular and important for me to know how to contain her in an image. This unfinished task reminds me that photography cannot make a life complete, but it can preserve a fraction of a second before time carries it away.

Some participants came through chance encounters; others are childhood friends, artists, performers, or people I have photographed through different stages of their lives. A girl stands at the edge of adolescence before entering the disciplined performance of ballroom dance. A childhood friend returns almost twenty years later carrying a child. One woman, born without hair, chooses a different head each day through wigs, while another shaves hers because she prefers the feeling. Tattoos, surgical scars, pregnancy, clothing, performance, and gestures become traces of decisions made upon and through the body. In one Paiwan family in southern Taiwan, two relatives continue to protect private truths that only they share, preserving each other’s right to decide when and how to be seen.

My method depends on time, trust, and continued relationships. I photograph participants in their homes, workplaces, neighborhoods, and spaces of transformation. Before each shoot, we begin from their present condition: they dress and present themselves in whatever way feels right to them, with the ease of friends meeting and making photographs together. Some images are observational; others are collaboratively constructed through clothing, makeup, movement, or play. For intimate stories, I discuss what may be shown and how each person wishes to be identified. When publication risks violating that trust, I withdraw the image.

At first, I believed I was preserving these women’s lives. Years later, I understand that their courage also shaped the person I became. No single participant changed me; the transformation accumulated through every encounter. G-book is my quiet form of rebellion against a culture that rapidly produces, consumes, and forgets images, and underestimates the weight of sincerity.

I hope the work reminds viewers not to abandon who they are when confronted by judgment, distortion, or hostility. Quietness here is not passivity, but the time through which experience becomes discernment. Years from now, I hope someone in Taiwan will encounter these photographs and recognize how we dressed, desired, cared for one another, protected our secrets, and tried to live truthfully in this moment. Photography becomes evidence not only that we lived, but of how we kept becoming ourselves.

G-book: https://www.changyuhsuan.com/g-book