Justin Kao was born in Taipei into a family of artists. His father is an ink landscape painter, and growing up in that environment, learning to appreciate the beauty of a place and understand it through line, light, and color became part of everyday life. Those early influences quietly shaped the way he would later see and interpret the world — an inheritance that surfaces most distinctly in his Taiwan mountain photography, where an Eastern sense of imagery and atmosphere, rooted in ink landscape painting, runs through his visual language.

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He began photographing in 2009. While majoring in architecture in college, he studied under renowned Taiwanese photographer Shen Chao-Liang in a documentary photography course, where he learned to construct visual narratives through a sensitive and thoughtful approach. Working around a self-defined theme, his final series of twelve photographs was personally selected and edited with Shen's guidance. This experience laid the foundation for the visual language and atmospheric qualities that continue to define his work today.

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After graduating, he pursued a career in architecture and has worked at Divooe Zein Architects ever since—the place where he has spent the longest period of his professional life and the one that has shaped him most profoundly. Its founder, Divooe Zein became another important mentor beyond photography, deeply influencing his understanding of architectural design and aesthetics. Both Zein and Shen share a remarkable ability to capture atmosphere—one through architectural space, the other through the photographic frame—and the convergence of these two disciplines has gradually shaped Justin's photographic aesthetic.

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His work has always revolved around one central question: how do we come to understand a place? In 2014, he spent his savings traveling alone across Western, Central, and Southern Europe in pursuit of architectural masterpieces. In 2015, while researching Chinese landscape painting for his undergraduate thesis, he embarked on a forty-day solo railway journey across China, tracing the cultural origins of its landscape tradition. In 2016, he walked around the island of Taiwan with a tent on his back for more than a month, experiencing its landscapes and communities at a walking pace. Between 2012 and 2023, he completed Taiwan's 100 Peaks over the course of eleven years. In recent years, he has continued traveling throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas, broadening his understanding of the world through encounters with diverse cultures and landscapes.

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Today, he continues his long-term work in Taiwan mountain and travel photography while also undertaking architectural and interior photography commissions. For commissions or collaborations, please feel free to get in touch.

 

Equipment​

 

Camera

​Sony A7C

Canon EOS 5D Mark III

Canon EOS 5D Mark II (before 2016)

IPhone 17 Pro Max

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Lenses

Sigma 16-28mm F2.8
Tamron 28-200mm F/2.8-5.6

EF 16-35mm F2.8 L II USM

EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM

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Tripods

FOTOPRO TC-PRO2