This is the latest of my occasional series of posts about the depiction of landslides in art.  Part 16 can be found here.

Chen Po-I is an unusual artist. He trained to Masters Level in Ocean Engineering at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan before turning to photography.  He is now a celebrated photographic artist with a long list of exhibitions.  He has a Flickr page depicting some of his work here.

His current exhibition is at the Fotoaura Institute of Photography in Tainan in Taiwan (there is a brief write-up of it in the Taipei Times).  The works are interesting and challenging.  In 2009 Typhoon Morakot struck Taiwan, bringing extremely heavy rainfall that triggered widespread landslides and debris flows.  Chen Po-I has collected a series of images of the destruction that the debris flows caused, focusing primarily on the marks left on walls by the flows:

Marakot 2: Photo courtesy of Fotoaura Institute of Photography

Marakot 4: Photo courtesy of Fotoaura Institute of Photography

Similar photographs to this series can also be found on Chen Po-I’s Flickr page. These images are all rights reserved, so I cannot reproduce them here, but they are well worth a look.  It is worth pondering what it would have been like to have been in one of these rooms as these landslides occurred.