It was 1956. The place was a photographic studio in a village in southern Taiwan.

A beautiful farm girl walked into the studio and asked to have her picture taken. A couple of days later when she came back for the picture, she heard the owner say, "I failed to do a good job. Could you let me take your picture again? It is free of charge." The girl kindly agreed.

But the same thing happened again and again. The fourth time the owner asked the girl to pose for him, the girl flew into a fury. "I don’t believe this. Just give me the pictures you have taken for me." "But I am not satisfied with the quality of those pictures. How can I give them to you?" said the stubborn owner.

Hearing this, the owner’s wife came out and decided to intervene. Thanks to the wife, the girl finally left happily with her pictures.

The shop had been open for only three months. The stubborn owner with the perfectionist character was Si Chi Ko.

Si Chi Ko is known as the first master of modern Taiwanese photography. His supreme photographic technique, coupled with artistic sensitivity, places him in a pivotal position in the establishment of a photographic aesthetic in Taiwan. He was born in Tainan in 1929, when Taiwan was still under Japanese occupation, and his life was punctuated with many unusual events and interesting episodes. Driven by a passion for the best in art and life, he engaged in a quest which took him from Taiwan to Tokyo, from Tokyo to the United States, and then on to southern Europe and North Africa. In order to fulfill his artistic ideals, he often had to let go of what he had already achieved in fame, applause and wealth, and move on to wherever his quest led him. His adventurous spirit always made him look forward to the future.

Childhood and teenage years

Ko was born into a well-to-do family in southern Taiwan. His father, Pi Ko, accumulated his wealth in the wholesale grocery business. Concentrating his whole attention on his business, Pi Ko was not close to his children. He only wanted them to stay out of trouble so that he would not have to worry about them. But Ko was far from being a submissive child--he got into trouble all the time with his mischievous deeds. "My childhood memories are all connected with my getting beaten by my father. I was such an unruly boy at that time."

When Ko was thirteen years old, his family was dealt a heavy blow. His brother-in-law lost a lot of money in stocks, and Ko's father, being his guarantor, decided to pay for the large debts by selling almost everything he had. The family experienced a drastic decline after this. Ko's mother was so despondent that she indulged in alcohol and opium. She died before long and Ko grew from a naughty, carefree boy to a quiet, pensive teenager.

Having finished grade school, Ko went to a junior college in Kaohsiung to study engineering. At that time, Taiwanese society was undergoing tremendous political change. After fifty-one years of Japanese occupation, the island was returned to China at the end of World War II. People from mainland China took over Ko's school from the Japanese. The students were at first happy to see this development, but they were quickly disappointed. The Chinese who took over the school were so corrupt that they even sold school equipment and put the money in their own pockets. Enraged by such deeds, Ko decided that he would not receive any more education under the Chinese. Although he had always done well at school, he gave up the chance of going on to university and started working in a chemical company.

It was there that he got his first camera. The manager of the company was a Japanese who had taken a liking to Ko. When he was about to go back to his own country, he gave a camera to the young man as a present. "A camera was still a rarity at that time. It made me popular with girls. They often asked me to take pictures of them." But if Ko had only used the camera to win girls' hearts, he would not have ended up as a great photographer. He spent a lot of time with his new equipment. He read books on photography and learned to prepare chemical baths and to develop film by himself.

Young and eager to learn, he was like a sponge trying to absorb whatever he could. In addition to photography, he was also interested in music, literature and astronomy. Almost all the money he made at that time was spent on books and record albums. His friend, Liu Sheng-fu, was very good at painting, and they often talked about the fine arts. Ko's sensitivity for art was developed at that time. Today, when he meets young people who have a passion for photography, he always advises them to learn and study as much as they can, not just photography. He believes that to be a good photographer, the most important thing is not mastery of photographic techniques, but an open heart that sets no limits on itself.

After two years of a calm, peaceful life working at the chemical factory, Ko began to feel restless. He wanted to get out of his ivory tower and get a taste of life. His friend Liu was planning to join the army, so the two of them enlisted in the Taiwan Military Corps, which had been organized to protect Taiwan from the military threat of mainland China.

However, they deserted three months later, their dreams of protecting their country shattered by the corruption and low morale they saw in the army. They hid for eighteen months, during which time Ko had the chance to work at his friend’s photographic studio for two months. Then, tired of the roving, unsettled life they were forced to lead, the two weary young men gave themselves up and went to prison. "Those eighteen months of life as a deserter had a great impact on my life. It made me believe that I could survive in any kind of environment." He believes that his adventurous spirit took shape at that time.

His first studio

After finishing his prison term and two more years of compulsory military service, Ko was twenty-six years old. He got married the same year. But since he was as poor as a church mouse, how could he support a family? It happened that the owner of the photographic studio he had worked in was about to close his studio. Borrowing money from his friends, Ko bought the studio and started his own photography business.

His customers were satisfied with the pictures he made and his studio enjoyed a flourishing business, but Ko often felt frustrated. At a time when the primary purpose of photography was simply to record people and places, Ko had higher expectations of his art. "I wanted to produce photographs of better aesthetic standards, but maybe my skills were not good enough." In addition, Taiwan was a rather poor country at that time and the films the studios used were mostly outdated, so it was hard for photographs to reach a certain quality. Ko soon lost interest in running the studio. Three months later, he closed his business and applied to go back to the chemical company where he had had his first job.

During the following three years while he worked in the company, his photographic techniques were greatly improved. Ko was lucky to have a boss who treated him really well. Although his job title was engineer, he seldom did anything that an engineer should do. Knowing his interest in photography, his boss set up a darkroom for him and asked him to take pictures of the factory, including factory equipment or meetings and activities held by the company. Ko spent a lot of time in the darkroom, and when his boss did not assign him any work, he was often out with his camera to shoot whatever took his fancy. He began to treat photography more seriously as an art and sent his works to competitions in Japan. Many works--including Cat on Roof, the first work he sent--won awards for him. He started to feel more confident in his skills and dreamed of going to Japan to study photography.

Japan

In 1959, the chance came. Ko got in touch with his brother, who had gone to Japan to study medicine and had lost contact with the family since World War II. Ko traveled to Japan and enrolled in the Tokyo College of Photography with some money given him by his brother.

Ko chose to go to that school because he had read many articles on photography written by its principal, Koen Shigemori, and had thought his views excellent. With his easy-going personality, Ko soon became a good friend of the principal. Shigemori often took him to galleries, theaters and places where artists gathered.

However, during those two years at the college, Ko did not spend much time with cameras. "Actually, I had mastered all the photographic techniques in Taiwan. What I needed to do was to develop and refine my vision as a photographic artist." Compared to Taiwan in the fifties, Japan was a relatively advanced, free country. It provided a rich cultural environment in which artists thrived. "I knew that to be a top-notch photographer, the essential thing was to have one's own vision and style," Ko said. "For a long time during my stay in Tokyo, I did not even touch a camera. Instead, I went to art exhibits and performances and devoured books which I couldn't get in Taiwan."

Taiwan

Two years later, in 1961, he graduated from the college and went back to Taiwan. At that time, Taiwan was changing at a fast pace. Industrialization was transforming the island's traditional agricultural society, and the influences of Western individualism were reshaping people's lives. Many modern art movements were introduced into Taiwan, and a lot of younger artists, dissatisfied with tradition, were crying out for new ways of expression in art, music, literature and architecture. Ko came back at just the right time.

To support his family, he still had to work in the chemical factory. However, he used his spare time to organize a photographic club and to stage his first exhibition in Kaohsiung, which created quite a sensation. The collection of his works covered a wide variety of subjects including natural scenes, people, and ordinary objects like broken windows and stained walls. One of his works, Blind Mother, attracted the attention of the influential art critic, Ku Hsien-liang. Depicting a blind mother holding her baby, this black-and-white picture was highly praised for its humanistic spirit. Admiring Ko for his talent, the critic decided to introduce him into Taipei art circles. He helped to organize a solo exhibition for Ko at the National Taiwan Art Museum in Taipei.

The museum was an important art center in the sixties, and many distinguished artists held their exhibitions there. Ko's photographic images immediately captured the attention of art lovers. He was praised for having created a modernist vision pulsating with an animating life force. "What opened our eyes were not the marvelous photographic and darkroom techniques he showed in his pictures, but the lively, ardent passion shining through those works," said Chung Ling, director of the Chinese Photographic Association, describing his feelings when he first saw Ko's works more than thirty years ago. "I had never seen any photographer who communicated his personal feelings and ideas so directly through his works. Looking at them, I was so very moved."

At that time, there were generally two photographic approaches in Taiwan--the more dominant pictorial approach and the documentary approach. The former approach avoided common everyday scenes, drew a veil over "ugly truth" and beautified its subjects, while the latter emphasized truth and accuracy. Ko's images had an identity of their own that stood apart from both. He was singled out by his own unique personal style and approach.

Immediately after the exhibition, Ko was hired by a prominent local advertising agency to work as the director of its photography department. For the next five years (1963-1967), he strove to bring the concept of artistic photography into his commercial work. Moreover, he produced a series of works on artists, including dancers, sculptors and musicians. He put on three exhibitions to display the pictures he had taken, which won him general acclaim. His works also continued to win him awards in Japan. Ko's name as a leading photographer was established.

Seeing his ability and potential, a dancer he had photographed, Huan Chung-liang, suggested that he go to the United States to pursue his career. In the sixties, the United States was the dream of every ambitious young man. Ko had wanted to go there since he had studied in Japan. He decided to leave everything he had established in Taiwan and go to a place where he was nobody to test his mettle. He was already thirty-eight years old.

The United States

His first stop was Los Angeles. After a solo exhibition there, he went to New York at the invitation of dancer Alvin Ailey. Ailey's dance group had performed in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, in 1962 and Ko had been given the chance to photograph their performance.

In the following several months, Ko concentrated on photographing dancers. He was good at capturing the vitality and dynamics of the moving figures. An exhibition entitled The Essence of Modern American Dance was staged in New York to present his work. The response was cordial. Immediately afterwards, he was invited to another exhibition at the University of Connecticut, which won him a chance to work for Dance Magazine, a leading American dance magazine.

Although Ko was gradually building his name in dance circles, the market for dance photography was not very large, so he decided to take up commercial photography again. After all, he still had a family to feed. Six months after he arrived in America, he got a job as an assistant photographer in the Krantzen Gold Studio and began to take pictures for product catalogues. The studio paid him sixty-five dollars a week. After paying tax, rent and meals, there was not much left. In a city full of thousands of photographers parading their talents, he had to lower himself and start from scratch.

In the following two years, he wandered from one studio to another, working under top commercial photographers, learning whatever he could and widening his circle of acquaintances. Gradually he made his own name. Magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, House Beautiful and Essence recognized his ability and commissioned him to shoot for them, including models, still lifes, cosmetics and furniture. He put a lot of creativity into his commercial photography. Once he had the chance to photograph a bed designed by an avant-garde artist. He had the bed, whose four sides were made of transparent acrylic sheets, moved outdoors at night. Placing it under the starry sky, he covered the bed with a blue velvet cloth and arranged for a model to lie on it. He then turned on the lights that were installed in the bed. Making use of a special exposure technique, he produced a photograph in which the model seemed to be lying in a starry sky. The creativity he showed in this photo caught the eyes of the famous photographer Pete Turner, who was the stills photographer for Steven Spielberg's ET. He invited Ko to be the manager of his photographic company.

Ko turned him down. Confident of his abilities, he decided to set up his own studio. It was 1971, three years after his arrival in the United States.

Working in the hot-house competitive areas of fashion and advertising photography was not easy. The top fashion magazines Ko worked for demanded that the photographic images that appeared in their magazines be entertaining and eye-grabbing, as well as creative. Ko had to be continuously coming up with fresh ideas to create whatever his customers wanted. The pressure he lived with was so great that when he reached forty-five years of age, his hair had all turned gray. But he had also changed from a nobody to a somebody.

"Reality forced me to take up commercial photography, but it was not something I really wanted to do," Ko remembers. "What I wanted to shoot were natural scenes like deserts or very cold places--the Sahara Desert or Alaska. I wanted to use the extremes in nature to express my inner feelings."

In 1976 and 1978, he took two trips with friends to the west of America and to southern Europe. The magnificence and wonders of nature touched the deepest cords in his heart. Having photographed any number of successful artists, beautiful models and flamboyant fashion articles, Ko longed for the simplicity of nature. For years, he had suppressed his craving for free artistic creation because of realistic considerations. Now, he wanted to travel and pursue what he really wanted.

In February 1979, he and his wife were divorced because of a growing alienation between them. His four children had all grown up by that time. He was free to follow his heart.

With a camera, two lenses, and books by Carl Jung, Erich Fromm and D. T. Suzuki, his favorite writers, he left the United States.

A free wanderer

Ko did not take a map with him. "Wherever there was a road, that was where I wanted to go."

In the next six months, his footsteps covered the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia. He photographed scenes along the way, catching every fleeting moment of inspiration. He felt reborn in nature. "I could feel the existence of myself at every moment of the journey," said Ko.

He enjoyed a creative freedom which was refreshing to him after more than ten years of commercial photography. He could lie in wait for two hours to get the picture he wanted, or go without his camera all day long. His most representative picture, Presence of Venus, was shot while he was travelling in Greece. The picture has three basic colors D an expanse of blue sea on the left and a red window in a wall of pure white on the right. The composed shapes and lines are so simple that they become almost abstract. There is a tension in the stillness of the sea, making one feel that Venus is about to rise from the sea. Thus Ko's friend, the famous Taiwanese poet Cheng Chou-yu, gave the picture its name.

After Europe, Ko thought of going to Africa to shoot deserts. But due to lack of proper equipment, he did not explore very deeply into the deserts--people warned him that with the old Ford he drove, he would be gambling with his life if he went out too far. His dream was not to be fulfilled until June 1981 when, funded by the China Times and better equipped, he drove alone into the Sahara Desert to shoot his dreamland. However, the trip almost cost him his life.

During his drive to Grand Erg Occidental, the second largest continuous sea of sand in the Sahara, his car got stuck in a place far off the road. No matter how hard he tried, the car just wouldn't budge. As the sun got hotter, he began to think of the worst that might happen. But what he worried about most was not his life, but all the film in the car which contained the pictures he had taken during the trip. In one or two hours, the film would melt in the scorching heat!

After praying to God to help him through the difficulty, he dug and dug into the sand, which had trapped the wheels of the car, until his hands bled. After what seemed like a century, the car was finally freed.

He was not to be intimidated by this mishap. The next day, he went out into the desert again and finally took the pictures he wanted. Instead of the panoramic desert views which most photographers liked to portray, Ko preferred to shoot the details of the sand dunes, whose flowing, rhythmic lines and curves mesmerized him.

The pictures he took during his travels in Europe and the Sahara were a great success. Examples nclude Tree and Wall, Passenger, and Morning of the Sahara. Different from the passionate style of his earlier works, most of the pictures took on an air of detachment, dominated by a mood of serenity and stillness. In some of the works, the natural scenes presented were even reduced to an interplay of lines, shapes and areas of colors. The colors were clean, luminous and saturated, the images peaceful and tranquil, distinguished by a rhythm of their own.

These pictures established his name as an internationally acknowledged master of color photography. For the next two decades, they were displayed at many famous galleries in America and Europe, including the Masters of Color Photography exhibition held in the Lizan Tops Gallery in Long Island, New York, in 1996. He was ranked with top American photographers such as Burt Glinn, Ernst Hass, Pete Turner and Barbara Wrubel. Galleries including the Hammer Gallery and the Kodak Visual Arts Center in New York and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan also included his works in their collections.

Back to Taiwan

Ko came back to Taiwan in 1980, twelve years after he left his home country. In the following two years, he held three exhibitions and gave a series of talks on the art of photography. As described by the local press, his lectures caused a whirlwind. People crammed into galleries and halls to see his works and to listen to his speeches.

One of the reasons why his pictures possess such high image quality is that he employs the dye transfer printing process. It is a complicated color separation and combination process that produces prints which have a vibrancy, depth and luminosity rarely seen in conventional photographic prints.

"Ordinary color photographs have only a short life," noted Ko. "Usually their colors fade after about ten years. But the dye transfer process creates prints which can last three hundred years, or five hundred years if the pictures are kept out of the sun." In the last ten to twenty years, he has spent almost all his money in making costly, high-quality dye transfer prints. But he insists on the best for his works.

Since 1993, Ko has settled in Taiwan with his second wife, the famous dancer Jessie Fan, who married him in 1985. Besides holding and organizing photographic exhibitions, Ko has also taken several trips to mainland China to photograph Chinese ethnic minorities, the historic Silk Route, and the religious art of the Tunhuang Grottoes. In addition to that, he has dedicated a lot of his time and energy to helping his wife advance her dance career.

To celebrate his seventieth birthday this year, a retrospective exhibition featuring representative works will be staged around Taiwan. From his collection of tens of thousands of pictures, Ko has chosen 110 to be shown in the exhibition. In the future, he plans to shoot a series of photos on Taiwan, hoping to capture and present the beauty of his homeland.