This exhibition is photographer Cynthia Ma’s wonderful journey. In southern Taiwan, a city with intense local flavors, Ma records images of wuniang—dancing divas. It documents a local theater group with glamorous dreams; it also documents the reality and illusion in the rehearsals of the actors. On and off the stage, they are like the shifts and inserts, one after another in a fantastic world. The pride on those faces and the grand gestures are actually sweat and tiredness, sigh after sigh and on top of all the struggles, all the eyes filled with fear and anticipation of uncertainty. Human desires rise and fall in circles and jumps, one after another. It is other people’s real life playing on stage.

“For me, the camera is a sketchbook”, says Henri Cartier-Bresson. “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture… That is the moment the photographer is creative.” If the splendor on stage is a dream, backstage, the messy scene in dim light is where the dancers awaken, and as Ma so intuitively perceives it.
With the monochrome camera, Ma aspires to explore all that is hidden beneath the fascinating surface, just like her erasing the colors or suspending the motions. As opposed to the songs and dances as well as the glamour and gorgeousness, Ma is more fascinated with the commotions offstage, where there is no spotlight but human dignity and perseverance, brought forth from all the struggles in life. In the breaks among light and music, we see the interludes in life. A lonesome shadow in the bustling, noisy crowd is like mirror images whispering stories beyond the plots. All the vicissitudes in life, left unsaid, are like the lonely ghost hidden in glamorous attire. When the unreal becomes real and the real turns unreal, who can tell, really, which is more real, those onstage or offstage? Cynthia Ma lets go of her barrier of reason, hits the shutter with intuitive thoughts and captures each blinking moment. “Maybe it was just a snapshot of 1/30 second with my hand shaking a little bit. But who cares about precision? I just wanted to catch that fantastic moment.”

Cynthia Ma said, all the pictures she took when shooting for “Dancing Divas of Taiwan” were snapshots. At the first glance, though, it may give an ambiguous impression that Ma took liberty of taking the pictures without the dancers knowing it. However, not only did she not mean to sneak or be like a peeping-Tom photographer, the dancers were not intended to hide themselves before the camera. It’s just like how photographer Moriyama Daido(1938-)applauds Kitashima Keiz?(1954-) on the photographs of people taken in the street, “the photographer does not embody a burglar’s style or a lecher’s eye; he has an audacious photographer’s soul that he could commit the ‘crime’ under broad daylight.”

In her pictures, Cynthia Ma also accidentally reveals to us the secrets of the dancers or the many unknown concerns on their mind. What a photograph may expose is sometimes too much to take or to gaze. The sparkling accessories and the shining light are barely a disguise of the aging tired face as well as the despair of long-gone past glory. Those tailor-made and dazzlingly decorated costumes look exactly what Chang Eileen masterfully describes, “life is a splendid and exquisite costume, with lice climbing all over it”. On the silhouettes of those fabulous dresses, there leave but beautiful yet melancholy gestures of hand and body, one after another. Through photographic image, Cynthia Ma exposes the youth that is destined to shine only once, as she honors the dancers who are to be left nameless and to vanish in history.