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M+, Hong Kong, © Chang Chao-Tang
Chang Chao-Tang 張照堂
Panchiao, Taiwan 1962 板橋 1962
1962
Chang Chao-Tang is among the most celebrated and pioneering Taiwanese artists of the last century. His surrealist photographic sensibilities, cultivated since the early 1960s, had a strong influence on the look of media and visual culture in Taiwan. In addition to developing an avant-garde photography practice, Chang was a photojournalist, a cinematographer, and a filmmaker. From 1968 onward, he worked for China Television Company—owned by the ruling Kuomintang party—and produced several documentaries exploring Taiwanese identity amidst the nativist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. He was also involved in Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s.
Panchiao, Taiwan 1962 is from a series of experimental photographs produced between 1962 and 1965 that made Chang a breakout success. Chang examined photography as an artistic medium and explored freedom of expression through staged, absurdist actions in nondescript locations, capturing the ennui and frustration of his generation in Taiwan under martial law. Titled with place names and dates, each image has a diaristic quality and evokes a sense of locality. Chang was born and raised in Panchiao, a city on the outskirts of Taipei that went through rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in the 1960s. The headless man in this photograph was a signature trope he often employed to embody a sense of nihilism or emptiness. Chang manipulated his shadow under the sun on his family’s rooftop to create an effect of decapitation. Juxtaposed here with the white background and hints of mountain peaks, the figure seems at ease, ‘staring’ into nothingness.
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