"One Lullaby Fits All": I wrote a Bio and a Statement

My Taiwan photographs, "Suan Suan Tian Tian", are going to be in the FORMAT Photography Festival this spring. I've tidied up the requisite Bio and Statement for their published materials. Here they are:

Bio:
Hannah Pierce-Carlson is a language teacher, student, traveler, and where those inspirations converge she’s an artist. She has formally studied cultural geography, geoscience, and creative writing, and grew-up in a household inundated with music and a curiosity for foreign languages. At an early age she aspired to use some creative means to allow her ideas and observations to play-out. She has found one aspect of her creative self satisfied by photography, but aspires to become fluent in any number of creative skills as well. She has lived, worked, and traveled (by bicycle!) in East Asia and various places in the United States. As of 2011, she will find herself back in China to teach and create with Michael Julius, her artistic partner and husband.

Statement:
Suan suan tian tian, in Chinese, means "sour sour sweet sweet." The phrase is the title of several saccharin pop songs popular in Taiwan and China; and commonly, it's a phrase describing a flavor whose metaphor extends to matters of the heart. My photographic senses are drawn to intimate, ordinary scenes that are belied by a note of ambiguous tension.

I spent a year living on the island of Taiwan. As an outsider, all I can attest is to my everyday experience. Perhaps under the influence of an on-going cultural adjustment, the days vacillated from gloomy to bright, from grey utility to colorful superfluity, from a droning monotony to a sporadic, exotic festivity. I hope that the photographed moments epitomize how the sour and sweet- or choose your opposing forces- are always in operation on the everyday, even beyond these Taiwan moments. The idea is to embrace their combination.

You can view Suan Suan Tian Tian at my website here http://gofeetgo.tv/

A few selected image titles:

Bus parked outside the tragically collapsed temple