Chien Chi Chang

Life and work

Chang received an M.S. from Indiana University, Bloomington and a B. A. from Soochow University, Taipei.

He joined Magnum Photos in 1995 and was elected as a full member in 2001.

He lives in Taichung, Taiwan and Graz, Austria.

Chang focuses on the abstract concepts of alienation and connection. “The Chain,” a collection of portraits made in a mental asylum in Taiwan, was shown at La Biennale di Venezia (2001) and the Bienal de São Paulo (2002). The nearly life-sized photographs of pairs of patients chained together resonate with Chang’s look at the less visible bonds of marriage. At the Bienal de São Paulo he was involved in the Thomann controversy.

Chang has treated marital ties in two books—I do I do I do (2001), a collection of images depicting alienated grooms and brides in Taiwan, and in Double Happiness (2005), a depiction of the business of selling brides in Vietnam. The ties of family and of culture are also the themes of a project begun in 1992. For 21 years, Chang has photographed and videoed the bifurcated lives of Chinese immigrants in New York’s Chinatown, along with those of their wives and families back home in Fujian. Still a work in progress, “China Town” was hung at the National Museum of Singapore in 2008 as part of a mid-career survey and at Venice Biennale (2011) as well as at International Center of Photography, New York (2012). Chang’s investigation of the ties that bind one person to another draws on his own divided immigrant experience in the United States.

Awards

Books and selected monographs

Video

Selected exhibitions

Selected sound installations