Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

CHANG Chao-Tang’s photographs taken during the Martial Law period fully reflect the empty and pale inner world of the young people at the time. They did not have an exit out of the suppressive social ambience. They could only helplessly downplay the seriousness of the issues and create absurd humors through heavy-hearted spoofs as they attempted to find a way out. Under the Martial Law, Chang really found a way to truthfully deliver the social reality at the time, making him a true pioneer in the history of Taiwanese art. (Written by LI Jiun-Shyan)

Artwork Introduction

This exhibition is CHANG Chao-Tang’s first comprehensive retrospective in his career as a photographer, and features more than 400 pieces of works from 1959 to today (including original photographs, contact prints, unreleased portrait series, sets of images taken with digital cameras and cellphones), together with eight documentaries and TV episodes. In the form of “exhibitions within an exhibition, the retrospective also includes two highly experimental and innovative avant-garde installations presented at two exhibitions in the 1960s, Modern Poetry and Painting and Formless. The exhibition also features a series of scribblings, drawings, doodles, notes, and collages, along with documents from the Photographers of Taiwan Series edited by Chang and other books and posters of film festivals.

The chronological order and content of the exhibited works have been grouped into six major themes: “Images of Youth, 1959-1961,” “Existential Voices, 1962-1965,” “Installations, Scribblings and Original Works, 1966-1986,” “Social Memory / Inner Landscapes, 1970-2005,” “Digital Quest, 2005-2013,” and “Faces in Time, 1962-2013.” Together, they comprise a complete picture of Chang’s image aesthetics and artistic features, while documenting his pivotal position in relation to his predecessors and successors, as well as his important contributions to the development of Taiwanese photography and film.

The exhibition is characterized by several innovative features. The first one is its extensive time span and grand scale, which makes the exhibition a rare instance that includes half a century of social documentary images in Taiwan from 1959 to today. Secondly, the exhibition focuses but is not limited to Chang’s well-known role as a photographer. Following the thematic thread of his visual creation and aesthetic thinking, the exhibition comprehensively presents Chang’s artistic achievements in various fields, in particularly, his lesser known role as an avant-garde and pioneering figure in the fields of experimental video and documentary. It is also because of this reason that the exhibition title uses “image” rather than “photography” to convey a wider and extended meaning. Thirdly, the exhibition includes a large amount of valuable archives, including scribblings, documents, contact prints, notes, image collages created by the artist over decades. Thus, it moves beyond the exhibition thinking of showcasing only “finalized works,” and demonstrates the “archival” accumulation and thought process in relation to image creation, together with a historical segment of the developmental trajectory of Taiwanese visual art. 

About the Artist 

CHANG Chao-Tang is a photographer, and has worked at China Television, Public Television Service Preparation Committee, Super TV, and Tainan National University of the Arts. Started taking photographs in 1959, Chang has held numerous solo exhibitions in Taiwan and abroad, and has curated group exhibitions and planned documentary TV programs. He was awarded the National Award for Arts by the Council for Cultural Affairs in 1999, and the National Cultural Award by the Executive Yuan in 2011.