Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao emigrated to the US from Taiwan in 1999, aged 18. He studied art and photography at the ‘School of Visual Arts’ and the ‘Pratt Institute of Art and Design’ in New York. His first major project was Habitat 7, which won first prize in The New York Times Magazine´s Capture the Times Photography Award. The photographs, taken over a two-year period, look at the ethnically diverse communities that have grown up along the IRT7 subway line that runs between Queens and Manhattan.

Using a large format 8 x 10 negative, Liao takes several pictures of the same location over the course of a day. He uses digital technology to combine different elements into images that are at once sweeping in scope, and packed with minute details, allowing him something of the discretion of a painter in composing his pictures.

His work has been shown at The Queens Museum of Art and the Houston Centre of Photography. Several of his works reside in collections such as The Museum of Fine Art, Houston and the Norton Museum of Art, and works have been acquired for the George Eastman House and Harvard Business School collections.T he Bronx Musuem of the Arts commissioned Liao to do a major project on the Grand Concourse comemorating its 100th anniversary which will run through the fall of 2009. Liao exhibited alongside Catherine Opie and Soo Kim at the Getty Museum opening in February 2010. Nazraeli Press published his first monograph in 2007, a second monograph on the Depth of Fields stadium project will follow in 2010.