
Chinese Name: 李秀雲
Born: 1919
Died: 2001
Birthplace: Pingtung County (Southern Taiwan)
Lee Hsiu-yun, a photographer born in Zhutian Township (竹田鄉), Pingtung County in southern Taiwan, had a keen interest in photography from the time he was young. He explored photography and darkroom skills on his own, from just looking at Japanese magazines to learn photography techniques. Since then, he has forged an indissoluble bond with photography. After graduating from high school, at the time of World War II, Lee Hsiu-yun worked in the Kaohsiung Agricultural Association. Later, he went to Sumatra, Indonesia to purchase Japanese military rations and promote cotton planting techniques. After the war, Lee returned to Taiwan and joined the Taiwan Sugar Corporation.
Back then, the price for a professional single-lens camera was almost 4 to 5 months' salary to Lee Hsiu-yun. To him, it was undoubtedly a luxury he could not afford, because he had to support his family. In 1964, at the age of 45, Lee was finally able to have his first camera. Since then, a Minolta SR-1 single-lens camera could always be found in his briefcase. Whenever he had the opportunity, he would not miss photographing any brilliant images. By doing so, he has left many precious records of those times for the world.
In February 1965, Lee and some like-minded individuals in Pingtung formed the "Single-lens Photography Club" due to a meeting of fate. Most of the members had strong feelings for Taiwan’s rural areas. As Japanese photography magazines advocated realism at that time, the photography style of Lee Hsiu-yun and others was also affected by this. Since then, he began to participate in various photography competitions and exhibitions, receiving a lot of recognition and feedback.
Although he started photography in his middle age, Lee has a unique style. Most of his photographs take Liudui Hakka villages as the subject. Early Hakka culture, rural sceneries, celebration etiquette, etc. were all captured into images under his lens, forming a large sketch of the greater Pingtung area in the 1960s and 70s, with Liudui as the core. He is good at using close-range, low-angle lenses to capture the bits and pieces of Hakka villages’ rural life. The images reveal true feelings and fully grasp the spirit and pulse of the times. The pictures are also full of the relationship between people and the land, and they have a deep sense of beauty, just like impressionist paintings. Therefore, he is known as "the man of culture in the farmland."
Lee Hsiu-yun’s wonderful photographs were taken from 1964 to 1970, but it was not till 2014, more than a decade after his death, when his children were renovating their old family home that they found a large number of his undeveloped film negatives stored in biscuit tins and paper boxes in a cabinet in the study. The state of the negatives was extremely poor, so his family members sought help from the Audiovisual Arts Media Center of Tainan National University of the Arts to coordinate their preservation and maintenance. After counting, it was determined there were 10,009 negatives, and the ones in relatively good condition were sorted out and scanned. That’s how the images of rural scenes in southern Taiwan captured half a century ago were able to be reproduced. Undoubtedly, Lee's works have left important traces and contributions to the historical images of Hakka people in southern Taiwan’s Liudui.