A Topography of Undoing series

2025

The legitimacy of the image as evidence has long underpinned the history of photography. Yet even within systems built on objectivity, a quiet paradox persists: tools may be reliable, but their users are not. As digital processes reshape how images are produced, long-held definitions of truth and authenticity begin to destabilize, revealing photography’s evidentiary foundation to be far less secure than it once appeared.

Peishan Huang begins her work with traditional photography and sculpture, then re-creates materials and impressions drawn from everyday life through repeated digital adjustments and constructed, imagined scenarios. Rather than documenting an existing site, she approaches a scene through cycles of refinement, misalignment, and reconstruction, photographing spaces that do not exist and later presenting these reproduced scenes in spatial or sculptural form.

This project functions as a dual experiment: it explores the boundaries of co-creation across different media, while also building a virtual space shaped by personal sensibility and emotional need. The work extends Huang’s ongoing inquiry into imitation, simulation, the desire to fabricate, and the poetics of the artificial. It questions the validity of “image as evidence” when operating within man-made contexts. Huang creates images that appear coherent yet contain intentional flaws, images that resemble evidence of a real situation, while those flaws expose their digital construction and simulated origins.