Award-winning Magnum photographer Chang Chien-Chi has always revealed his fascination for human relationships and human conditions in his unadorned photographs. Since his foray into photojournalism in the early 1990s, Chang has captured subjects as diverse as the brokered marriages of Taiwanese men and Vietnamese women in Double Happiness, the mental patients at Taiwan's highly controversial Long Fa Tang Temple in The Chain, and New York City's Chinese migrant workers in China Town. Driven by his passion for photography and concern for humanity and social realities, in these works, Chang has explored themes of alienation and connection, restriction and freedom, and madness and normalcy, often by using methodical repetition of compositions. This perceived repetition, in Chang's opinion, is not about duplicating two identical things, and the subjects in his photographs are hardly just 'doubles' of each other. Instead, each photograph builds on the other to express the latent alienation and overt connection between his subjects.
For the first time, Doubleness: Photography of Chang Chien-Chi brings together a selection of photographs from Double Happiness, China Town and The Chain. Accompanying these powerful images are illuminating essays by photography critic Vicki Goldberg and anthropologist Dr Xiang Biao. The essays in combination with the unprecedented collection of Chang's work shed new light on his themes, tying seemingly disparate subjects together and revealing how the varied situations and people in the photographs of Chang Chien-Chi do in fact mirror each other and our own experiences.