This article has been contributed by Sophie Nowakowska.
What is home? Where is it? Is it etched into the walls of a house one used to live in, or does it reside in the body and mind, or perhaps it’s hiding in a rice cooker used to prepare meals for the family? These are the questions LingJiun seeks to answer through her work. A Taiwanese-born, London-based photographer employs visual storytelling to capture the quiet, often unnoticed moments of everyday life. Photography is her language, through which she navigates themes of identity, memory, and cultural heritage. She reveals traces of human presence in the world, the weight of everyday objects as vessels of memory, and the way their absence can summon longing.
LingJiun’s project Dear John is a collection of intimate photographs of her close friend, John, exploring their conversations about identity and masculinity. Through this work, she captures John’s experiences with the cultural and social expectations placed on him. The photos depict moments of him wandering through food markets, sharing meals, or sitting alone in his apartment. Some images are blurred, reflecting the fluid nature of identity, while others show sharp portraits of John staring distantly into the camera, unreadable and detached, caught between the self he presents and the one he is still discovering.
In her Kitchen series, LingJiun explores how identity is shaped by space and its objects, focusing on domestic interiors to examine personal and cultural identity. Photographing kitchens in Taiwan and the UK, she uncovers both similarities and differences that define the concept of home. Everyday kitchen items like spoons, wooden boards, kettles, and plates become rituals that strengthen family bonds across generations. A key symbol in her work is the red electric rice cooker, a Taiwanese household staple that represents more than an appliance—it’s a cultural anchor, a keeper of nostalgia, and a reminder of heritage through shared meals. LingJiun’s images capture not just the kitchen’s physical space, but the emotions, traditions, and histories embedded in these objects, highlighting their cultural significance.
Her project Echoes stands in contrast to Kitchen. While Kitchen is filled with presence, Echoes grapples with absence. Prompted by her family’s move from their home of nearly thirty years, the series documents the transformation of a once-familiar space, now emptied of life. While revisiting this abandoned house, LingJiun questions the meaning of home when the people who once animated it are gone. Through her photographs, she captures the ghosts of lived experience, the residue of daily life imprinted onto walls and floors, the quiet weight of departure. Echoes is a meditation on the impermanence of spaces, the way they hold onto memory, and the bittersweet ache of leaving something behind.
LingJiun’s work is a visual meditation on identity, memory, and the concept of home. Through her intimate and evocative photographs, she reveals the emotional weight carried by everyday objects and spaces, exploring how they shape and reflect personal and cultural histories. Her practice is a search for belonging, capturing the fleeting yet profound traces of human presence in the world.