Appropriating Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities, Liang-Pin Tsao examines the notion of nationality and the rhetorics of glorifying communion by mediating the ghostiness of Chinese Martyrs’ Shrines, formerly Japanese Shinto shrines, which are dispersedly located all over Taiwan through his photography.

Shinto in Taiwan enshrined Taiwanese soldiers who lost their lives fighting for the Japanese Emperor. Back to the Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan that began in 1895, the Empire of Japan introduced Shinto, its state religion, to the island. In 1937, as the Empire of Japan pursued an expansionist policy in China and utilized Taiwan as a base for its aggression in Southeast Asia, the Taiwanese population was encouraged to embrace Shinto. After World War II, many of the Shinto shrines were torn down by the Kuomintang from mainland China, while others were replaced by martyr's shrines. The changing of regimes does not change the rhetoric of national communion as sacredness.

By ghostly documenting a headless figure bowing to the shrines all over Taiwan, Tsao mediates the ritual as a void and the shrines as an arena underscored conflicts between the dead and the living, the sacred and the secular, and between national history and democratic values.