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M+, Hong Kong, © Chang Chao-Tang
Chang Chao-Tang 張照堂
Penghu, Taiwan 1965 澎湖 1965
1965
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 involved in Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s.
Penghu, Taiwan 1965 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. Penghu, an archipelago to the west of Taiwan, was where Chang carried out his mandatory military service. Here, a disembodied hand reaches out along a desolate, sandy road that disappears into the elevated horizon. The hand, blurred in contrast to the sharply focused ground and distance, suggests a sense of yearning and searching.
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