The Baroque in 'Everything will fall into ruin'
By Jacinta Giles
'Worlds within Worlds' March 2026
During the Baroque period, artists saw ancient ruins as powerful symbols for the transience of life and the futility of human achievement. Ruins pointed to the decline of earthly powers and the inevitable decay of the physical world, which enabled artists to use them to explore the fragility of human existence, the passage of time and the ultimate fall of power – be it political or spiritual. Baroque painters, such as Giovanni Paolo Panini and Marco Ricci, filled their canvases with crumbling buildings and overgrown arches, creating imaginative spaces through which viewers could consider lost pasts and possible futures.
Yao Jui-Chung’s ‘Everything will fall into ruin’ series presents derelict sites of industry, abandoned civil dwellings, deserted military and prison buildings, and the remains of statuary scattered throughout the Taiwanese countryside. Since the early 1990s, the artist has traversed Taiwan and its surrounding islands, compiling hundreds of photographs of places abandoned due to its social and economic development in the aftermath of martial law (1949–87). These otherworldly images – human-made yet devoid of human presence – are salient markers for shifts of power and collectively reveal fissures in Taiwan’s sociopolitical history.
For Yao, all things ultimately fade, with the artist stating:
After the decay and destruction of their physical being, [ruins] reappear in another form and preserve the aura of the original being as relics . . . Although our brief existence is accompanied by decay, the silent ruins may be a symbol of the constant birth and death process in nature. Too much commemoration and reconstruction will distort the lesson hidden within. If we can understand this, ruins are no longer just ruins but are an essential experience in life.
Yao Jui-Chung / Taiwan b.1969 / (Untitled) (from 'Everything will fall into ruin' series) 1990–2009 / Black and white digital photograph on paper / Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2009 / © Yao Jui-Chung
Curator's insight
Yao Jui-Chung’s ‘Everything will fall into ruin’ series not only embraces the Baroque period’s fascination with the ruin, but also embodies the eccentricity of the Baroque vision.
Baroque artists revolutionised perspective by moving away from the static, rational and balanced linear viewpoint of the Renaissance – which organised the viewer’s gaze – towards multiple off-kilter vanishing points that created an experience of energy and chaos.
An innovation in Baroque perspective was the use of strong diagonals, which replaced the horizontal and vertical gridlines favoured in the fifteenthand sixteenth centuries.
These diagonal compositions, which can be seen in many of Yao Jui-Chung’s photographs, create a sense of motion, leading to an overarching feeling of instability.
At times, intense foreshortening makes these Taiwanese ruin landscapes, appear to burst out of the frame and lunge into the viewer’s space.
Delighting in strange angles of approach, the photographs in ‘Everything will fall into ruin’ reinforce the Baroque idea that we are usually standing in a place which gives us only a partial glimpse of the world around us.
Written and spoken by Jacinta Giles (Assistant Curator, International Art), March 2026
