內心外境 : Believing is Seeing

This project began from a simple intuition: perception is never neutral. What we call reality is shaped by belief, memory, desire and fear long before we become aware of it. In Chan Buddhism there is the idea that the outer world is inseparable from the inner mind. We do not merely observe the world, we construct it. 內心外境 means inner mind, outer landscape. The world we see reflects the structure of our own consciousness. At the time I created this work, I did not yet have the language of Jung or Flusser fully in my vocabulary, but I felt drawn to similar questions. What does a photograph actually show? Is it a record of a person, or a record of how we perceive them? Vilém Flusser writes that photography is an abstraction that appears to be reality. Even when an image looks truthful, it is already translated and shaped by the apparatus and by the person operating it. If that is the case, then every portrait contains projection. In Believing is Seeing, I wanted to make this projection visible. I used symbolic markings and ritualistic makeup not to disguise the subjects but to externalize something internal. The faces begin to resemble mythical beings, as if they belong to another world, yet their eyes remain unmistakably human. The tension between archetype and vulnerability is important to me. The markings do not erase individuality. They condense inner narrative into a visible surface. Looking back, I recognize how strongly this connects to Jungian ideas of the persona and the shadow. Through imagination and collaboration, I tried to translate the aura or psychological presence of each person into an external language. The photograph becomes a space where inner belief takes form. The viewer is also part of this process. The images do not simply ask who these people are. They ask what you see in them. The mythical quality emerges not only from the makeup but from the act of interpretation. Belief shapes sight. This work is not about fantasy. It is about the mechanics of perception. It suggests that identity is relational and constructed between subject, photographer and viewer. The outer image mirrors the inner structure. Even after time has passed, I still resonate with this core idea. Photography does not reveal reality. It reveals the way we believe in reality. 內心外境.