Name: Chase Lin Nationality: TAIWAN
Faculty/Year: School Political Science and Economics, 2014
This week’s interview is still with Chase Lin, our campus celebrity who ran a marathon in North Korea! After last week’s interview, he gave us some photos of his marathon running!
Yup, that’s a photo of him running in Pyongyang! If that didn’t jog your memory successfully, check out Part 1 of the interview here: http://www.hercampus.com/school/waseda/campus-celeb-chase-lin-part-1
What about photography, what inspired you to begin doing that? What’s its impact on you?
I think I do it out of an appreciation for beauty. Nowadays, you can take a photo with your phone and so taking pictures become this thing that everyone can do, it’s so convenient to the point that most pictures have no real quality or message to them. I want to give the people around me, the people I care about, the beauty that photos are supposed to have. And I guess it’s also because I wanna take a good picture of girls I like (laughs). Seriously though, I took a lot psychology-related classes in university and when you’re in the process of photography, there’s this unadulterated form of tension between the photographer and the subject. A strong like or dislike, trust or distrust.
So is that why you find photography interesting?
In “On Photography” (by Susan Sontag), there’s a quote somewhere around the beginning of the book that says :“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge — and, therefore, like power.” That’s just really interesting to me because it seems that photography is just this simply thing but through it you can really see the hundreds of aspects of life in both its complexity and its simplicity. Just with a flash, everything becomes raw again.
We have heard that you held a photography exhibition in this fall! Could you tell us more about it?
Actually, it’s just a small-scale, self-funded exhibition. I was inspired by a Waseda dai-senpai, Amanda, who currently works in the Zen Foto Gallery in Roppongi. I saw her exhibition at Cat’s Cradle about two years back that displayed the work she did over her seven years living in Tokyo and I was really touched and eventually I wanted to display my work at Cat’s Cradle as well. It’s actually really simple, I just want to express my love for Tokyo. I just have a feeling that these four years, living in the same dorm, walking the same campus and going through the same four seasons – these things are going to be some of my life’s most unforgettable experiences. This is why I wanted to put something together for the people who have been in my life during this time. Photography is very direct, it’s easier to understand than words. I mean, my Japanese isn’t great, but I believe that my Japanese friends can understand me on a deeper level through my work. The Chinese name of my exhibition is 摄外人 is a pun on the phrase 涉外人 which means something along the lines of a person who communicates with the outside world to understand others more. The English name Gaijin Photography is inspired by a foreign media in Japan named Gaijin Post. Generally, I named it after how I view myself as a part of Tokyo and my hopes for the future.
Check out the final portion of Chase’s interview next week! Yes, it’s a long interview because Chase was patient enough to give us really detailed answers!
Interview by: Iris Kuo Translation by: Jan Lee