Perceiving the Spirit of Place
Exploring the relationship between nature, culture, and architecture
Reading Places
Justin Kao was born into a family of artists and began photographing in 2009. His work explores how places are perceived through the relationship between landscape, culture, architecture, and human experience. Over time, he came to realize that his father's landscape paintings, the places he encounters while traveling, and the spaces he designs all explore the same question: how do we perceive and understand a place?
His background in architecture has deepened his understanding of space, light, scale, and atmosphere. Through multiple perspectives, he explores different expressions of form and space, creating restrained and layered images that reveal the unique character and emotion embedded within each place. Over the years, he has traveled alone across Europe in pursuit of architectural masterpieces, spent more than forty days exploring China's landscapes, walked across Taiwan with a tent, and devoted eleven years to completing Taiwan's 100 Peaks. These experiences have shaped his understanding of how places are formed by landscape, memory, and human presence.
Today, he continues exploring the world through photography, with long-term projects focused on Taiwan's mountains, travel, architecture, and the spirit of place.
Taiwan Mountain Photography
Mountains cover nearly 70% of Taiwan, with over 260 peaks above 3,000 meters, making it one of the world’s most mountainous islands. From tropical to alpine environments, its diverse landscapes have shaped grasslands, lakes, cliffs, glacial remnants, and hundreds of thousands of endemic species. “The world does not lack beauty; it lacks the eye to discover it.” This raw and mysterious allure has inspired Justin Kao’s passion for mountaineering and alpine photography.
Since beginning alpine photography, Justin Kao has looked beyond grand, iconic viewpoints, embracing unexpected moments along the journey — glimpses of the mountain's own character, like a wordless conversation. Through varied perspectives, he captures their purity, natural tones, and textures, revealing Taiwan's landscapes closer to the land's essence and the sensibility of Eastern landscape tradition.
Architectural & Spatial Photography
Architecture, as a place shaped jointly by people and their environment, carries the vision of its designers, the lives of its users, and the marks left by time. For Justin Kao, architectural & spatial photography is not simply about documenting form and appearance — it's about reading a space through light, scale, material, and atmosphere to reveal the spirit and emotion within it.
With a background in architectural design, he has spent years exploring buildings through both travel and work — from modernist masters such as Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto to contemporary architects like Rem Koolhaas and Tadao Ando — photographing libraries, museums, hotels, and other spaces along the way. This wide range of experience has sharpened his eye for the atmosphere of a place.
Back in Taiwan, he continues documenting the work of Divooe Zein Architects and collaborates with other architects and interior designers on photography commissions. Bringing together his architectural training and photographic practice, he focuses on capturing the shifting light, texture, and atmosphere within a space, using images with a distinct sense of character to convey the ideas and spirit behind each design.
