My work is rooted in the act of revisitation. In 2008, I traveled to China to trace the homeland of my grandparents, who fled to Taiwan in 1949 at the close of the Chinese Civil War. That journey yielded over 500 rolls of 35mm negatives. Back in New York, I printed hundreds of photographs, but many negatives remained untouched—latent in both image and meaning—because I wasn't ready to confront the fragmented nature of my identity, shaped by the entangled histories of China, Taiwan and the United States.

Spanning three generations of migration, I have long struggled to situate myself within dominant geopolitical narratives. I often felt like a counterfeit, an uncanny replica without an original. Only through sustained reflection on inherited silences and estranged family ties have I begun to re-engage with this unfinished archive.

In the darkroom, each negative enlargement becomes a site where memory and forgetting converge, like a dream dissolving in the morning light. From a single negative, multiple prints emerge, not one identical to another. Here, identity is not fixed, but fluid. There is no “original,” no “bad copy,” only process, presence, and the ongoing work of reintegrating a past that is "never dead and never past."

Wayne Liu
endlessstairs@protonmail.ch