"The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure. The contemporary is precisely the person who knows how to see this obscurity, who is able to write by dipping his pen in the obscurity of the present."

Giorgio Agamben

What is contemporary art? It is this kind of art that sticks to the gaze of one's own time. What is photography as contemporary art? Compared with painting and sculpture, the artistic status of photography has been established for less than 50 years. From the invention of photography to the present, its long-term and continuous identity is a perfect mechanical servant, used for evidence, archives, surveying, monitoring and recording, and serving institutions with disciplines including police, prisons, hospitals, schools, factories, etc... Whether in historical relations, social relations, or power relations, photography has never been a pure medium. In the process of shaping individuals into tame and compliant, photography is involved in every discipline, and every illusion is created with the help of photography. This is the original sin of photography. Therefore, photography as contemporary art is more of a criticism of itself.

For this reason, when we understand contemporary photography from the perspective of semiotics, we do not focus on the form, composition, style, beauty, and other attributes of the work from the perspective of aesthetics and interest, but from the present, reality and our subjectivity. In this way, the work is no longer an object to be viewed, but a subject that shares with us, and the fluidity of the symbols is related to our fluidity, leading the cognitive process of symbol movement to the action process of the subject's creation.