CHANG CHAO-TANG IS WIDELY RECOGNIZED as the first artist of his generation to deviate from the propagandistic, journalistic, and salon-style photography of postwar Taiwan. A tireless proponent of documentary filmmaking who had made lasting contributions to the genre since the 1970s, Chang helped shape the development of visual art and film on the island with his pioneering work, and gave rise to a distinctive voice in imagemaking and Conceptualism in Chinese art. Born in 1943 in a doctor’s household in Banqiao, on the outskirts of Taipei, Chang came of age during a period of decolonization, recuperation, and identity-building in Taiwan. He was among a group of artists who explored new means of expression in a society under martial law, following half a century of Japanese colonization and the mass immigration of mainlanders after the Chinese Civil War. While modernist painters turned to abstraction as a strategy to break from orthodox Chinese ink painting and Japanese-influenced oil painting styles, Chang and his cohort—including Chuang Ling, Huang Hua-cheng, and Chen Yao-chi—looked to ordinary life as a more radical and authentic source of creativity. In the 1960s, they ushered in new aesthetics through performative actions, mobile exhibitions, self-published magazines, and experimental photography and film while cultivating a cultural consciousness that was specific to the conditions and sensibilities in Taiwan.
Inspired by mainland-émigré poets who channeled surrealist and existentialist ideas to portray their psychological trauma from war, displacement, and repression, and by postwar Western and Japanese film, literature, theater, and art, Chang constructed a conceptual approach to capture the feeling of anger, uncertainty, and rupture. To him, to be xiandai (“modern”) was to forge new methodologies of storytelling through the image. Artistically precocious and intellectually rebellious, Chang had his breakthrough while a civil-engineering undergraduate at National Taiwan University in Taipei. Between 1962 and 1965, he made black-and-white pictures of himself and friends at derelict sites on the edge of the industrializing city, away from surveillance. While the distorted bodies and faces in Chang’s early work are decidedly surrealist, they reflect the truthful feelings of emptiness and frustration of a restless generation. The tension between the body and nature also offered a contemplative space. Panchiao, Taiwan 1962—the artist’s iconic self-portrait of a headless silhouette set against a distant landscape—articulates a sense of drift and defiance. By playing with camera positions and natural light, Chang declared photography an artistic medium for social critique and visual experimentation; in doing so, he became a central voice of Taiwan Modernism.
The Republic of China’s expulsion from the United Nations in 1971 triggered a nativist turn in Taiwan’s art and intellectual circles, which further strengthened Chang’s focus on ordinary lives and emotions. By this time, he had begun a career as a photojournalist and documentarian for the state-owned China Television Company, which became his experimental launchpad. He made programs that focused on subjects who were often overlooked by the official narrative of positivity, such as street vendors, traditional opera performers behind the scenes, and idle children at the park. Chang chronicled their lived experiences and surroundings with a tinge of absurdism, often using unorthodox compositions, perspectives, and camera techniques, but always with an air of sincerity and empathy. In Homage to Chen Da (1977), Chang featured the nomadic minstrel’s powerful, sorrowful tunes, not only to preserve an oral tradition, but also to give an urgent call to a heritage and history that deserved attention. “I have two DNAs. At once traditional and modern, at once keen on bringing back the past and moving forward,” Chang said recently. To him, these forces were not contradictions, but essential in making humanity visible.
Chang’s poignant images made him a sought-after cinematographer for auteurs such as Cecile Tang Shu Shuen (China Behind, 1974) and Chiu Kang-chien (Glamorous Boys of Tang, 1985), but it was his The Boat Burning Festival (1979) that marked a watershed in moving-image making. Chang edited his and Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s documentation of the Daoist ritual in southern Taiwan to Mike Oldfield’s 1975 rock album Ommadawn. The passion and spectacle of the religious procession were transformed into a new form of reality on broadcast television through the jarring yet electrifying juxtaposition of the music and the subject matter. In this postmodern masterpiece, Chang made the local event legible to a wider audience through his humanist lens and an audiovisual imagination that transcended geopolitics, beliefs, language, and time.
A shy and terse documentarian, Chang worked across visual art, film and television, music, dance, poetry, literature; he also collected materials just as diverse. The breadth and depth of his interests—a fan of Bob Dylan, Francis Bacon, and Samuel Beckett, in addition to grassroot legends Chen and Hung Tung, for instance—reveal an intrepid mind. His writings and edited volumes of photography in Taiwan, and his mentoring—especially through his teaching at the Tainan National University of the Arts and his establishment of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival—nurtured practitioners and artists across the Chinese-speaking world. Chang’s work showed me the grandeur and progressiveness in vernacular traditions, as well as the beauty of the inevitable passage of time. He was serious but not inflexible, witty but never esoteric. On celebratory occasions of his accomplishments, he always honored his departed friends and coconspirators, a humble and true believer in the spirit of collectivism. The news of Chang’s passing on April 2 came less than a month after the death of the publisher and cultural archivist Huang Yung-sung—Chang’s friend and collaborator since high school. Together, they made my generation in Taiwan confident about our cultural identity. We mourn the loss of two visionaries.
Lesley Ma is Ming Chu Hsu and Daniel Xu Associate Curator of Asian Art, Department of Modern and Contemproary Art, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
