Wei-Li Yeh

Three Places for Marguerite Duras, 2003–2006, consists of seven photographs taken by Wei-Li Yeh in an abandoned house next to his residence. The series documents four consecutive years, with every sequential photo captured from the same angle, and opens with Yeh’s blurred self-portrait. The series chronicles real or staged events as the artist returns to document the gradual changes and deterioration of the space.

The photographs are presented in various formats: printed on canvas, mounted on acrylic or as light boxes, or lying on a table. Their considered mounting and display highlights the materiality of each photograph as object. In Three Places, for Marguerite Duras, #2 of 7, 2004, a cracked and tarnished polyurethane coating over the photograph obscures the image of the abandoned house, with its collapsing asbestos ceiling panels and a hint of greenery beyond the window. The addition of the surface treatment discolors the photographic image in a manner not unlike memory.

The series is an homage to French novelist, screenwriter and experimental filmmaker Marguerite Duras and her stories of departure, loss, and rootless existence. Yeh blurs fiction and fact with a materials-based technique similar to that which Duras deployed as she “writes herself a stable world,” as Maxine Hong Kingston has described. Yeh, in his own way, attempts to make sense of being neither here nor there and coming to terms with his own in-betweenness—he was born in Taipei, moved to the United States as a child, and returned to Taiwan twenty years later. He stabilizes himself through revisiting and documenting his world in the photograph-object.