This book opens like an arm raised to reveal an armpit.

I met Auntie Jin Yun, now seventy-five, while working at a café, where we washed dishes together. Only a few days into the job, she suddenly asked me during a lunch break, “Young man, do you want to see my sexy photos from when I was young?”

I took the album without expecting much. But as I turned the pages, I was stunned. The photographs had been made thirty-five years earlier. In them, Jin Yun raises her arms high to reveal her armpit hair. Rather than conforming to conventional ideas of the female body and what is considered sexy, she meets the camera with a quiet, unwavering gaze.

For thirty-five years, Jin Yun has proudly shared this series of photographs with the people around her. At work, even as she repeatedly immersed her hands in water and washed greasy dishes, she continued to wear vivid clothes, sparkling hair clips, and brightly painted nails. I began to wonder: What does beauty look like when someone has spent thirty-five years holding fast to her own sense of it?

I invited her to make new portraits with me. At first, she hesitated, saying, “My armpit hair is all gone. I’m not as sexy anymore.” Yet as soon as I raised my camera, her hands instinctively returned above her head.

During the shoots that followed, Jin Yun bought small parasols, earrings, and necklaces. She altered her clothes, designed her own wigs, and took me back to places where she had often posed for photographs in the past: Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, Daan Forest Park, and parks near her home.

The photobook brings together two moments separated by thirty-five years. The “sexy photos” Jin Yun has proudly preserved—in which she raises her arms and displays her armpit hair—are placed alongside the portraits we made together when she was seventy-five.

The cover enacts the gesture of lifting an arm and revealing an armpit. Beginning with the line where the shoulder meets the clothing, the image gradually opens onto the endpapers, where a small close-up of armpit hair comes into view. Moving from the cover into the book echoes the movement of the body: opening the shoulder, raising the arm, and exposing the underarm. Through this intimate and usually hidden part of the body, the book invites readers to gradually encounter the beauty Jin Yun has defined and sustained for herself.

Tsai Ting-Bang (b. 1999, Taiwan) is a Taiwanese artist working with photography and photobooks. Drawing from his Taiwanese and Vietnamese heritage, his work explores family history, identity, migration, and intimate relationships. Through long-term photographic projects and book-based practices, Tsai examines how personal narratives intersect with broader questions of belonging, memory, and cultural inheritance. His photobook Born from the Same Root received the First PhotoBook Award at the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards and the Singapore Photo Dummy Book Award in 2024. In 2025, his project Hui Shui Dang Dang: Aunt Jin Yun, the Beautiful One received the Hasselblad Foundation Photo Book Grant.