Chien-Chi Chang often works around the concepts of social violence, alienation and connection. The Chain (1998), a stunning series of portraits of pairs of shackled patients, caused a sensation at the 2001 Venice biennial and then the following year at the Sao Paolo biennial. The series anticipates Chang’s critical look at the bonds of marriage, a subject he treated later in two works, I do I do I do (2001), a collection of images depicting alienated grooms and brides in Taiwan, and Double Happiness (2005), a brutal depiction of the business of selling brides in Vietnam.
In Chinatown, a body of work begun in 1992 that spans more than 20 years, Chang photographed and filmed the bifurcated lives of Chinese immigrants in New York’s Chinatown, along with those of their wives and families back home in Fujian. Chinatown was hung at the National Museum of Singapore in 2008 as part of a mid-career survey, at the 2011 Venice biennial, and at the ICP in New York in 2012. The project draws on Chang’s own deeply divided immigration experience in the United States.
Chang joined Magnum Photos in 2001. He lives in Graz, Austria. A major retrospective of Chang’s work will open at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan in September 2027.