The Mother as a Creator (Chinese: 《母親如同創造者》) by Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang is a black-and-white mother-son sequence begun in her Taiwan studio in 2001 during her University of Brighton doctoral studies and extended through 2022.
Prompted by an unexpected pregnancy and the fear that motherhood would erase her artistic self, Wang treats motherhood as creative labor rather than anonymous sacrifice. The project rejects both sentimental mother-and-child imagery and the figure of the saintly, self-denying mother. It also responds to gendered Taiwanese conventions, including a family genealogy in which women could be reduced to surnames or omitted. Across the sequence, Wang examines how maternal identity, artistic authorship, aging, work, and a child's growing autonomy can coexist. Its emotional register is mixed and sometimes resistant rather than celebratory.
That mixture takes visual form in twelve staged photographs. Wang begins alone and pregnant, seated with writing across her abdomen. In every later installment, an earlier portrait appears within the new setting, producing a recursive "time tunnel" of nested family images. Her son progresses from a toddler reaching for the shutter cable to an injured child, student, teenager, and young adult. Domestic rituals sit beside exhibition setup, desk work, graduation, imagined flight, equal height, arguments over freedom, long-distance separation, and Wang's fiftieth birthday. Props, frontal arrangements, and repeated pictures turn private milestones into a layered record of collaboration and changing distance.
The event-based method, rather than a strict annual schedule, shapes the series' rhythm. Wang used a medium-format camera to preserve detail. Museum and gallery sets produced in 2022 and 2023 are gelatin-silver prints.
The work was exhibited during its development at the University of Brighton in 2004 and 2005, then circulated through the Taiwan Biennial, Festival Images Vevey, Photoville, the Daegu Photo Biennale, PHOTO Australia, AIPAD, Paris Photo, and Getxophoto. Wang paired it with a related series in the accordion-fold photobook Reframing Motherhood (2020), whose extended format echoes its accumulated time. Getty, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and Tainan Art Museum have acquired works from the project.
