In Census, Ting-Ting Cheng, who just came back to her home country at the time, explored the exiting value systems and bias in Taiwan in a humorous way.
The project is an experiment. She walked on the street in Taipei and photographed 800 people by 35mm negatives, categorizing them in different categories, then weighing, and photographing the piled-up films. For example, in the image here, “I am a housewife and I would have to give birth to a male baby so my mother in law would be happy.”, The 100 negatives of female weighed 22.1g, heavier then 22g of 100 negatives of male. So the theory of ‘male is better than female’ has been overthrown.
Cheng used this ridiculous method to compare the values of different people, including people of rich/poor, educated/non-educated, male/female and foreigners/Taiwanese in 4 images in the series, sarcastically pointing out the ridiculous value systems existing in the society. In the images, the actual human figures on the negatives are hidden, what viewers can see is only the shape of the films; symbolizing that the people in the society are categorized by the stereotypes, losing their own individual identities. The images are presented like Chinese landscape painting, outlining the profile of the city.
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