Central Park has been photographed so often that it is difficult to see. Jeff Liao’s Central Park New York answers that difficulty with a governing constraint: he followed the Chinese 24 Solar Terms, the traditional division of the year into twenty-four intervals, to track the quiet, cumulative shifts in light, foliage, and weather across the park. What the book records is micro-change — the small changes a single visit may miss. And because Central Park is itself a designed landscape, maintained and argued over, the balance of nature and design that Olmsted and Vaux set out more than 150 years ago becomes the concern the book engages rather than a backdrop it assumes.
Liao adapts the vertical format and multiple perspectives of traditional Chinese landscape painting. That inheritance places the book between the painted scroll and the camera, changing how the park reads on the page. Born in Taiwan in 1977, Liao moved to the United States in 1999 and settled in Queens, New York. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Queens Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; the J. Paul Getty Museum; George Eastman House; and the Norton Museum of Art. Nazraeli Press published the book in 2017 as a 60-page hardcover with 24 duotone plates.
What gives the volume its weight is that the Solar Terms govern the project from within. They determine what is photographed and when, not a theme applied afterward. For a place as familiar and as heavily pictured as Central Park, the structure turns sustained, patient looking into the method itself. The book belongs to a larger body of New York work, yet its particular discipline — an inherited Chinese framework turning the camera on an American subject — is the reason it stands apart.
That governing idea, and the way it shapes a book rather than a portfolio, is where collector interest lies. The Solar Terms set the sequence of attention across a year; they are structural, not ornamental. This is a photobook in which framework and place are genuinely reciprocal, and it rewards the kind of looking it demands.
