China Town

For the second time in his career, Magnum photographer Chien-Chi Chang will exhibit new work in the Venice Biennale. His photographs in the series “China Town” are part of a seventeen-year work in progress.

Outsiders are not welcome in New York City’s China Town—where trust comes from blood ties—but Chien-Chi Chang was as persistent as his subjects were secretive. Seventeen years ago, he made the acquaintance of a handful of men who lived in a single tenement apartment in China Town. He ate with them and slept on their floor, helped them with English language phone calls and forms, and, slowly, began to photograph them. The men—mostly uneducated, undocumented and unskilled—paid as much as $75,000 to be smuggled into the U. S. to work as dishwashers and day laborers. In crowded dorm-like apartments, they dreamed of prosperity and of their families back home.

Chien-Chi Chang was curious about the men’s wives and the children that they had often not seen since birth. A decade ago, with a grant from the prestigious W. Eugene Smith award, Chang went to visit their villages, where the women live in a kind of purgatory, waiting for the absent men of the household to save their menial wages in order to reunite the family. To contrast with the bleak, black-and-white lives of the men in the U.S., Chang chose to photograph the families in China in color. And because he is free to travel, he says, “I have become a messenger between these divided families.” In 2005, he began using audio recordings and, in 2007, video to continue to document them. “I want to move the project to another dimension through a combination of still photographs and moving images within a soundscape,” he says, “and, ultimately, to make these families, with their sufferings and triumphs, audible and—at last—visible.”

Chien-Chi Chang joined Magnum Photos in 1995, and he lives and works between Taipei and New York City. Alienation and connection are the subjects of much of his work. His investigation of the ties that bind one person to another—and to society—draws on his own immigrant experience.

“The Chain,” a collection of portraits made in a mental asylum in Taiwan, caused a sensation when it was shown at the Venice Biennale (2001) and the Bienal de Sao Paolo (2002). The shocking, nearly life-sized photographs of pairs of patients literally chained together resonate with Chang’s jaundiced look at the less-visible bonds of marriage. He has treated marital ties in two books, I Do I Do I Do (Premier Foundation, 2001), a collection of images depicting alienated grooms and brides in Taiwan, and in Double Happiness (Aperture, 2005), a brutal depiction of the business of selling brides in Vietnam. An earlier version of “China Town” was on view at the National Museum of Singapore in 2008 as part of his mid-career survey exhibition entitled Doubleness.