A photograph taken in Brighton, England, the day before a Taiwanese artist gave birth in 2001 became the first panel of a project that has now run for a quarter of a century. Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang has photographed herself with her son Tong in front of a large print of the previous image, again and again, building the black-and-white series known as “The Mother as a Creator” into a nested sequence where every new frame carries every old one inside it.
The work found a fresh audience this week. A post shared by Complex on Thursday, captioned “A mother spent 17 years documenting her son as he grew up, and the result is insane,” drew 335,583 views and 3,500 likes within hours, according to the post’s data. The photographer’s own account, credited in the post, has been sharing the layered images for years.
Look closely at any later photograph and earlier versions of mother and child appear stacked behind the pair, receding toward the original self-portrait of the pregnant artist. Wang, born in Taipei in 1972, was studying for a PhD in fine art at the University of Brighton when she became pregnant, and she has said the project began as a way to prove she could remain an artist while raising a child. A related 2001 series shows her signing and dating her pregnant belly the way a painter signs a canvas, The New Yorker reported.
The frames read like a diary with stage directions. A 2003 image preserves her toddler beside the tripod with his leg in a cast. A 2004 entry celebrates Christmas. In the 2011 photograph the two appear to fly through a cartoonish rainstorm, holding each other. The 2014 frame catches them at exactly the same height. The 2018 portrait, “Arguing for Freedom,” came from a concept her son built out of his favorite anime, a shift The New Yorker read as his first step into his own creative life.
The gaps carry meaning too. Wang told the magazine the prints from 2007 to 2009 were damaged during a move, that 2012 and 2013 were lost to her son’s start in junior high and her own gallery opening, and that from 2015 to 2017 he was going through puberty and did not want his picture taken. “The density of maternal time was not intensive as before,” she said. The missing years have now become as much a part of the record as the prints that survived.
The premise underneath the project is an argument. Wang, who describes her home culture as traditionally patriarchal, has framed the work as proof that motherhood is itself a creative act rather than a slow erasure of the self, a counterpoint to a public discourse where the subject usually surfaces as celebrity confessionals like Kylie Jenner’s viral motherhood reflections. The series has spanned 21 years and counting, It’s Nice That wrote in a 2021 feature, with toys, Christmas trees, record players, books and painting rollers drifting through the foreground as the boy discovers language, music and drawing and eventually leaves home. The son has moved from subject to collaborator, and the pair now agree on each image in advance. “I do feel sad about the time flying,” Wang told the outlet.
A second series runs alongside it. “My Son and I at the Same Height,” begun in 2002 when Tong was learning to walk along a low wall, stages mother and son at equal height every year, the boy perched on luggage early on and the mother standing on raised surfaces once he grew taller. In her artist statement, published by Lenscratch, Wang writes that as the mother of a son holding the privileged position of eldest child in Taiwanese society, she wanted to practice equality with him deliberately, year after year, so the idea that men are superior to women would not carry into his generation.
The institutions took notice. Works from the series are held by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Getty, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Nelson-Atkins Museum and others, the Getxophoto festival archive notes, and the project has shown at Paris Photo and festivals in Switzerland, Korea, Britain and Australia. The BBC praised the photographs for transcending the cliche of motherhood, and The New Yorker wrote that in them Wang asserts her active role in the making of another life, according to her published acclaim. Her first photo book, “Reframing Motherhood,” collects both series in an accordion-fold edition printed in Mandarin, English and Korean, publisher delpire and co lists.
Taiwan keeps surfacing in the site’s stranger corners, from the museum volunteer who accidentally damaged an artwork while cleaning it to the 7-Eleven mascot blown into the sky by strong winds. Wang’s project is the quieter counterweight, a homegrown body of work now hanging in the collections she once doubted she would reach.
The viral posts still call it a 17-year project, the span that first circulated online around 2018. The camera says otherwise. Wang is an assistant professor at National Dong Hwa University and the founder of an art space in Hualien, and by 2022 she and her son had marked her 50th birthday in one of the layered portraits, sharing cake while she held her own book. The series is 25 years old and the son is a grown man. Time never asked permission.
