The Chain is the point of origin for everything that follows on this site.

Between 1993 and 1999, Chien-Chi Chang photographed residents of Lung Fa Tang, a psychiatric sanctuary in southern Taiwan, where people were paired and locked together at the waist in a practice known as the Chain of Compassion. Over seven years, he made 50 life-size black-and-white portraits, each revealing an irreducible humanity behind the restraint.

The Chain became the foundation of Chang's lifelong exploration of alienation and connection, freedom and restraint, belonging and displacement. The visible chains in these photographs point to the invisible ones that shape all our lives.

Between the 1990s and early 2000s, Chien-Chi Chang photographed weddings across Taiwan as the country's booming wedding industry transformed a private rite of passage into an increasingly elaborate public performance.

Moving between studios, ceremonies, and banquets, I Do I Do I Do examines the institution of marriage through the rituals and expectations surrounding it. The work looks beyond celebration to moments of uncertainty, tenderness, humor, and quiet dissonance, revealing how one of life's most intimate commitments is shaped by the social world around it.

Set within the brokered marriage industry linking Vietnam and Taiwan, Double Happiness examines how intimacy is organized and negotiated across borders, where marriage becomes less a private beginning than a carefully managed passage.

Chang reconsiders the wedding character 囍 not as a promise, but as a social structure built from ritual, expectation, and necessity. His photographs capture the tension between hope and transaction, asking not whether these marriages are real, but how identity is reshaped when happiness itself becomes something to be arranged.

For more than three decades, Chien-Chi Chang traced a hidden corridor between New York's Chinatown and the villages of Fujian, following undocumented immigrants and the families they leave behind. In cramped tenements and makeshift dormitories, they work in kitchens, on construction sites, and in garment factories, saving every dollar to repay debts and send money home. Their lives are shaped by labor, sacrifice, and the hope that distance will one day give way to reunion.

Photographed in black and white in New York and in color in China, China Town inhabits two worlds bound by memory, longing, and time. As some families are finally reunited, others begin new journeys of separation. Now extending into a third generation, the project reveals migration not as a single event, but as a cycle that continually reshapes families across decades.

Between 2007 and 2009, Chien-Chi Chang entered the clandestine network that helped North Korean defectors escape through China and Southeast Asia toward asylum. Living in constant hiding, they waited months or even years, not knowing when they would move, whom they could trust, and what danger lay ahead. Every stage of the journey carried the risk of capture, forced repatriation, imprisonment, torture, or death.

Escape from North Korea dwells in the prolonged uncertainty that defines life in flight. Across still photographs, video, and sound, the project explores exile as an enduring condition of waiting, fear, and fragile hope, where lives remain suspended long after the border has been crossed.

During the final years of military rule, Chien-Chi Chang photographed, filmed, and recorded everyday life in Burma beneath surveillance, censorship, and silence. Political reforms briefly suggested that decades of authoritarian control might finally give way to a more open society.


The surveillance was low-tech but pervasive. No one knew who might be watching or listening, so people learned to assume that they always were. Burma, Land of Shadows captures a society suspended between fear and possibility, where uncertainty itself had become a form of control.

Viewer advisory: this video contains explicit scenes of intravenous drug use.

In 2011, while on assignment for Médecins du Monde, Chien-Chi Chang made Bongo Fever among heroin users living on the margins of Dar es Salaam. Blending still photographs, moving images, and sound, the film follows the rhythms of addiction and survival, documenting explicit drug scenes as part of a lived reality.

Neither documentary nor advocacy, Bongo Fever observes lives hidden from public view with patience and restraint. Moving between stillness and motion, it creates an intimate portrait that asks how dignity persists under the weight of addiction, poverty, and social neglect.

Between 2006 and 2012, during years of near constant travel, Chien-Chi Chang carried a Mamiya 7II as a visual diary. He exposed only a single frame when something—a place, a gesture, a room, a fleeting recognition—felt worth remembering. A roll of film lasted days or weeks. If no photograph revealed itself, none was made. Together, these solitary frames became a record of a life lived in transit.

Drawn from this larger body of work, Jet Lag reflects on the psychological landscape of perpetual movement. Airports, hotel rooms, anonymous interiors, and self-portraits traced a life shaped by distance and constant crossings. The project came to a close with the birth of his child. The journeys continued, but movement no longer carried the same meaning. Every departure now implied a return, and every return, carried the knowledge of another separation.

For more than three decades, Chien-Chi Chang has returned to Taiwan, photographing the island through successive periods of change. This selection draws from the earlier years of that ongoing engagement, observing a society as it emerged from martial law into a new democratic era with extraordinary energy, contradiction, and imagination.

The photographs linger where public life and private experience quietly converge. They move between ritual and spectacle, humor and tragedy, the ordinary and the surreal, returning to one of Chang’s enduring concerns: how individual lives are shaped by the larger social and historical forces that surround them.

Chien-Chi Chang first traveled to Ukraine in 2014 while researching a sound project inspired by Mikhail Kalashnikov’s final letter of remorse. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, he returned within days. He went as a photojournalist but also as someone born and raised in Taiwan, hoping that witnessing the realities of war might deepen the conversation about a conflict many in Taiwan increasingly fear.

Across repeated journeys, Chang photographs war less as combat than as a condition that reshapes the landscape, the body, and the mind. Moving between front-line positions and moments of uneasy stillness, the work traces endurance, waiting, and the psychological toll of prolonged conflict.

After decades spent crossing borders in pursuit of other people’s stories, Chien-Chi Chang gradually turned his camera toward the place where those journeys came to rest. Made over many years in Graz, Austria, Home observes childhood through changing light, seasons, toys, drawings, windows, and imagined worlds.

Rather than concluding the journey, Home returns to the questions that run throughout Chang’s work. If the earlier projects explore migration, conflict, and identity across nations, these photographs suggest that home is where memory is formed, where children inherit the world before they understand it, and where the search for belonging begins—and perhaps never ends.