The Studio Window on the Street: Peng Ruei-lin as a Photographer in the Public Eye
In 1931, Peng Ruei-lin (1904–1984), the first Taiwanese to obtain a degree in photography, returned to Taiwan after graduating from the Konishi Professional School of Photography and established Apollo Studio in Taipingcho Dadaocheng—today’s Yanping North Road Section Two. Originally located on the second floor of a hotel, the studio was later renamed “Yapolu Studio” in Mandarin. In the following year, 1932, the studio expanded to include a ground-floor storefront with a glass display window, which functioned as a space for presenting what was then regarded as the new practice of “art photography.” A photograph taken during the period of the Greater East Asia War, which this article refers to as Exterior View of Apollo Studio, reveals that the display window had a certain depth where portraits and various staged props were arranged in a unified composition. Each window display was conceived as a unit that resembled what might today be described as mixed media or installation art, which at that time was presented to an undifferentiated public on the streets of Dadaocheng during the 1940s.
Exterior View of Apollo Studio taken during the Greater East Asia War
According to the description of this photograph on the Facebook page “Peng Ruei-lin and Our Times”, the Japanese colonial government required every household to paste tape on window glass, which was intended to prevent shattering during air raids. The display was arranged with the tape forming the foreground, where strips extended from the upper left and right corners toward the lower center point, symbolizing the beams of a searchlight projected from a battleship into the sky. In the higher space, several model airplanes hovered around the portraits, some near and others receding into the distance. The installation thus retained the original function of the studio window as a site for presenting photographic works. Yet, it simultaneously inserted the portraits into a visual field charged with the imagery of war in the sky. Such an arrangement inevitably raises questions concerning who these individuals were, whether they were people of Taiwan, Japan, or other Asian countries. The striking tape suggested beams of light that illuminated their faces, yet it also suggested the fire of war that approached them. At this time, Peng Ruei-lin, who had already completed his service with the army in Guangdong, placed the multitude of human figures within the interplay of light and shadow in the display window, which revealed the subtle sensitivity of his mind in the midst of wartime conditions.[1] The tape required by the Japanese government on the glass may have been a protective measure for windows, yet it may also be understood as a visual expression of how the flames of war in East Asia crossed borders and intruded into private spaces.
From the perspective of Peng Ruei-lin’s original intention when establishing the studio window,[2] the display functioned, first, as a means of engaging the urban public of Taiwan with a photographic aesthetic, and second, as a space for experimenting with how photography might extend beyond the confines of the frame and free itself from the flatness of the surface. The photographic studio window facing the street transformed what had previously belonged to the enclosed space of the studio or the darkness of the darkroom into a photographic event that unfolded before the public eye. In the case of the photograph Exterior View of Apollo Studio, the arrangement of the window seemed to pose a question: in an era of slaughter, when human lives were treated as expendable, how could the memory of individual faces be preserved? From this perspective, Apollo Studio was not only the first modern school of photography in colonial Taiwan but also an experimental site for contemporary photographic display.[3] Yet in May 1945, the building of Apollo Studio was designated as part of an air-raid shelter and was demolished in the following month, which brought Peng Ruei-lin’s fifteen years of work as a studio owner to an end amid the destruction of war.
Taking a 1940s photograph of the exterior of Apollo Studio as its central image, the exhibition Piercing Through a Porous Archive held in June 2025 in Ginza Tokyo developed a multilayered dialogue with Peng Ruei-lin’s photographic practice. This dialogue explored the visualization of war and public display, the mediality of archives and photography, as well as the politics of wartime memory and biopolitics.
Piercing Through a Porous Archive: The Mediality of Historical Display and Searchlight
Reflections of Light
The exhibition Piercing Through a Porous Archive, curated by Guo Jau-lan and Osaka Koichiro, brought together works by photographer Peng Ruei-lin, painter Fujita Tsuguharu, and contemporary artist Fujii Hikaru.[4] Held from 6 to 28 June 2025 at the gallery Shibunkaku in Ginza, it featured fourteen works and series. Shibunkaku Ginza is located on the main avenue of Ginza at the intersection of Nishi Gochome, where the entrance consists of a glass door and floor-to-ceiling windows, allowing pedestrians to glimpse the exhibition poster placed in the entrance hall and the stairway leading to the underground exhibition space. The photograph previously discussed, Exterior View of Apollo Studio, was chosen as the main visual image of the exhibition. The window of the photographic studio and the glass entrance of the gallery together created an intriguing resonance, which guided the sunlight refracting from the street into the exhibition space.
On the opening day, the exhibition poster of Piercing Through a Porous Archive was displayed at the entrance of Shibunkaku, which created a sense of transparency, where the poster resembled a studio window, and the glass door behind it became the passage leading inside. Photograph by Yeh Hsing-Jou.
At the entrance, three works immediately establish the indices that frame the curatorial proposition of the exhibition. The first is Fujita Tsuguharu’s (1886–1968) war painting The Bombing of Singapore (1942). The second appears on a low cabinet along the right wall, where two of Peng Ruei-lin’s albums—Guangdong Album (1938) and Shasen Album (1919–1945)—are placed closed and therefore inaccessible to viewers. The third element unfolds gradually: in the main display area to the left, Fujii Hikaru (b. 1976) presents his series Tokyo Shasen Portfolio: Composition and Peng Ruei-Lin Guangdong Album Composition, consisting of seven works, together with three framed photographic originals by Peng Ruei-lin. When the gaze turns back toward the entrance, a small wooden box can be seen on the left wall. At first it appears unobtrusive, roughly the size of Peng’s photographic prints, but its significance only becomes clear at the end of the exhibition route, when it is revealed to be the cover of Fujii Hikaru’s Japan’s War Art 1946 (2022). This realization establishes the third index of the exhibition, a work that forges a link between the beginning and the end of the display and situates the entire project within the concept of the “porous archive,” where form and artwork remain intertextually bound.
Left: Peng Ruei-lin, Shasen Album, 1919–1945; Right: Guangdong Album, 1938. Photograph by Tadayuki Minamoto, courtesy of Shibunkaku.
Fujii Hikaru, Japan’s War Art 1946, 2022. Photograph by Tadayuki Minamoto, courtesy of Shibunkaku.
Fujita Tsuguharu’s The Bombing of Singapore depicts the Japanese bombing of the Tengah Air Base in 1942. The flames of war that illuminated the vast sea at night resembled the most immense and intense moment of exposure in the era of optical photography, which provided the painter with a scene of nocturnal sketching that could only be rendered in a time of war. In the painting, the night sky is burst open by the brilliance of fire, yet the darkness still conveys the immensity of the night and the infinity of what remains unseen. The work manifests the fact that vision, which is always like a beam of light, can only offer a partial glimpse of reality, and that the authenticity of historical documents is often dispersed, incomplete, and difficult to fully grasp.
Frames and Boxes versus Photography and Digital Print
From the proportion of photographic originals included, it becomes clear that Piercing Through a Porous Archive was not conceived as a historical exhibition of artifacts, nor was it simply a photography exhibition, but rather it was structured as an archival exhibition. Its principal displays were the two series Composition of Peng Ruei-lin’s Guangdong Album and Composition of Peng Ruei-lin’s Tokyo Shasen Portfolio, which presented selected inner pages of two albums through scanned images and digital prints. These reproductions included blank spaces, where photographs had been removed, along with Peng Ruei-lin’s handwritten notes. Because the exhibits were visibly album pages, the mode of viewing was directed toward an informational form of perception, which was then accompanied by an appreciation of photographic aesthetics. The “archival units” within the exhibition therefore consisted not only of the photographs that remained in the albums, but also of the absent images that were no longer preserved, the blank spaces that signaled their absence in scale and position, and the words that Peng himself inscribed. By foregrounding the arrangement of photographs within the albums, the exhibition revealed the emotions and memories that Peng invested in the people and places he photographed. In doing so, Piercing Through a Porous Archive emphasized precisely this interior dimension of the photographer—an aspect rarely acknowledged within conventional modes of photographic display.
Exterior View of Apollo Studio, shared on March 25, 2019, by the Facebook page “Peng Ruei-lin and Our Times.”
The exhibition Piercing Through a Porous Archive was conceived not as a photography exhibition but as an archival exhibition. Photograph by Tadayuki Minamoto, courtesy of Shibunkaku.
The Counterpoint of Painting and Photography: The Presences of the United States and Taiwan
Among the works from the 1930s and 1940s, two pieces by Fujii Hikaru establish a counterpoint between painting and photography, extending the narrative into the postwar contexts of the United States and Taiwan. Japan’s War Art 1946 (2022) addresses the confrontation that arose between the United States and Japan concerning Japanese war paintings after the Second World War, a theme that resonates with Fujita Tsuguharu’s identity as a war painter and with the painting included in this exhibition.[5] The version presented here consists only of an open wooden box containing two SD cards, which serve as carriers whose contents cannot be visually accessed. This configuration appears to allude to the 153 war paintings returned to Japan from the United States in 1970, which have not yet been made fully available to the public, while also underscoring that war painting remains a taboo subject that has never been thoroughly debated in postwar Japan. A second work, Shibuya Incident 1946 (2016), documents the armed conflict that took place in Shibuya in 1946 between Taiwanese and Japanese groups. The work presents portrait photographs of young participants reenacting the event, which correspond both to Peng Ruei-lin’s portrait photography and to the suspended portraits arranged above battleships in the studio window composition. The Shibuya Incident stemmed from tensions between Japanese society and the so-called “third country nationals,” a term used to describe residents in Japan who were neither Japanese citizens nor nationals of the Allied powers in the postwar era. Fujii’s work stages a reenactment of the event with young immigrants in Tokyo together with Taiwanese residents in Japan, recorded in video form and accompanied by portrait photographs modeled on prison intake images, which present each subject in both frontal and profile views.[6]
Fujii Hikaru, Shibuya Incident 1946, 2016. Photograph provided by Hikaru Fujii.
Contemporary Warfare
The historical materials presented in Piercing Through a Porous Archive reveal how individual lives were profoundly shaped by warfare. People are forced into positions of alliance or opposition that crossed national boundaries and were determined by shifting international politics. During the Greater East Asia War, Peng Ruei-lin accompanied the Japanese army to Guangdong. Prince Cường Để of Vietnam, who lived in exile during the 1930s with support from Japan, spent two years in Taiwan in the late 1930s, during which time he became acquainted with Peng. Fujita Tsuguharu, who served as an official “Seisen (Holy War) Painter” during the Second World War, was later accused by the leftist Nihon Bijutsukai (Japan Art Association) of being a “war criminal painter.” These examples illustrate how wartime conditions multiplied national identities and fostered cross-border experiences of daily life and cultural assimilation, leaving profound marks on each individual. As curator Guo Jau-lan has argued, the writing of art history today, although often framed through regional perspectives, must also address the complexities of contemporary geopolitics and the enduring consequences of the postwar era.
The smoke of artillery and the conflicts of global economic warfare in the twenty-first century have become both intensified and diffused into the finest pores of daily life. The debts of war have been apportioned into systems of information control, soaring commodity prices, exploitative relations of class and international politics, and, most gravely, the wars that continue to shape the present, such as the Russia–Ukraine conflict that has persisted since 2022 and the Israel–Gaza war that has unfolded since 2023. War in the contemporary world remains an unresolved issue, which demands that the multiplicity of nations and the hegemonies of the postwar era be brought into the core of critical reflection. Art history, therefore, must engage in a sustained dialogue with the conditions of contemporary society. Piercing Through a Porous Archive traced the intertwined life experiences and military perspectives of Peng Ruei-lin and Fujita Tsuguharu within the wars of the twentieth century, which in turn interrogated the contemporary normalization of war through multilayered perspectives. —[SCR]
/Translated by Danson Wong
[1] In 1938 Peng Ruei-lin was conscripted by the Japanese army to serve as an interpreter in Guangdong, where he also photographed numerous documentary street scenes and was described as a “diplomatic photographer.”↩
[2] Peng Ruei-lin described: “The display window had a significant impact on income, and each time it was changed, revenue would certainly increase. In considering the arrangement of its contents, the following conditions were taken into account: (1) the season; (2) in order to investigate the eyesight and preferences of the public, a popularity test was conducted. The method was to use a single woman as a model and produce six photographs of the same size, each with different poses, lighting, and backgrounds, arranged in a row and numbered, with customers allowed to vote freely. The first prize was a voucher granting a fifty percent discount; (3) by observing the signboard women employed by more well-known studios, one of them was specially invited to be photographed and displayed, so that the public could make comparisons. …” Source: Materials shared by the Facebook page Peng Ruei-lin and Our Times on March 25, 2019↩
[3] In the 1930s, Apollo Studio not only provided professional photographic services with the most advanced techniques available on the island, but also broke new ground by transforming the traditional master-apprentice mode of private instruction into publicly offered photography courses. The students came not only from Taiwan but also from Penghu, and even from regions such as Xiamen and Indonesia. Source: Gujin Taiwan (February 1, 2019). “February 3, 1984: Commemoration of Peng Ruei-lin, Taiwan’s First Bachelor of Photography.” GJ Taiwan.↩
[4] Guo Jau-lan is Associate Professor in the Art History and Visual Culture program, Department of Fine Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts. Osaka Koichiro is Assistant Professor at Kyoto University of the Arts.↩
[5] After the Second World War, the United States, under the policy of demilitarization, initially planned to destroy Japan’s war record paintings. It was not until 1947, when “American intelligence agencies officially recognized the artistic value of Japanese war paintings,” that the works were preserved. In 1970, 153 of these paintings were returned to Japan in the form of an “indefinite loan.” Excerpt from: Japanese War Art 1946 exhibition.↩
[6] Fujii Hikaru, Exercise1: Playing Non-Japanese. The title Shibuya Incident 1946 was adopted in the exhibition Piercing Through a Porous Archive to refer to this work, which presents the portrait photographs as a partial component of the video installation Exercise1: Playing Non-Japanese.↩
*The original Chinese version of this article was published on Artouch.com
**This article was sponsored by the “Phenomenal Writing—Visual Arts Criticism Project” of the National Culture and Arts Foundation and the Winsing Arts Foundation in 2024.
***Header Image: The exhibition Piercing Through a Porous Archive （2025） in Shibunkaku Ginza. Photograph by Tadayuki Minamoto, courtesy of Shibunkaku.
