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M+, Hong Kong, © Chang Chao-Tang
Chang Chao-Tang 張照堂
Panchiao, Taiwan 1964 板橋 1964
1964
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 the state-owned China Television Company and produced several documentaries exploring Taiwanese identity amidst the nativist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. He was also active in Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s.
Panchiao, Taiwan 1964 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. In this eerie composition, a headless male figure, a signature trope in Chang’s work, is seen standing against the wall of an abandoned, half-demolished courtyard. One of the figure’s hands reaches up as if to clutch his heart while the other hand is in the pocket of his trousers. The interior of the courtyard is filled with urban detritus and signs of decay, and is overgrown with weeds. Chang achieved the effect of the headless man by asking the figure to lower his head and shooting the image from above.
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