In Census, Ting-Ting Cheng, who just came back to her home country at the time, explored the		中文
exiting value systems in Taiwan, which she couldn’t use to, in a humorous way.
The project is an experiment. She walked on the street in Taipei and photographed 800 people by		Exhibition View
35mm negatives. She cut the negatives, and then categorized them in different categories,
followed by weighing, comparing and photographing the piled-up films. The 8 categories are,
male, female, foreigners from the West, local Taiwanese, students from National Taiwan
University, people who are not students from the university, people whose monthly salary is over
NTD.50000, and people whose salary is lower than the number. And the 8 categories are divided
in 4 pairs, compared which negatives are heavier than the other, in order to prove or overthrown
the preference towards male, foreign culture from the west, high-education and wealthiness in
Taiwan society.
For example, in the image, “I am a housewife and I would have to give birth to a baby boy 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, 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 printed by rice paper with stamp, presented like Chinese
landscape painting, outlining the profile of the city, at the same time, pointing out the effect from
Confucianism in the value systems.