Freedom and constraint, love and alienation,
compassion and shame are some of the complex issues that define
the ambiguous relationships between Chang's captured subjects
and the outside world. Considered social misfits and
a disgrace to their kin, the pictured men were consigned by
their relatives to Lung Fa Tang, a Buddhist sanctuary and Taiwan's
largest chicken farm with a workforce of nearly 700 mentally
ill inhabitants. There is a general lack of understanding of
mental illness in Taiwanese society and no comprehensive support
system to care for the mentally ill. Consequently, despite
having no resident psychiatrist at Lung Fa Tang, Hieh Kai Feng
claims that it provides a much needed relief for the community,
alleviating the huge burden placed on his patient's families.
Physically linked by a small chain around their waists,
day in day out, only unlocked for sleeping, the more stable
of the two is supposed to assist the less lucid in their
daily chores. With their ties to society severed but bound
by the 'chain of compassion' to one another, the interactions
between the paired outcasts can only be fraught. As Chang
comments: The most pathetic part is that once the two are
chained together, they are forever incapable of fighting
against it. Their only alternative is to become submissive,
to give in, or they will never walk out of that place.
Visiting the asylum over a period of six years, Chang took
the present photographs in one session, asking them to pose
after lunch on their way back to work. By positioning his
subjects as if on stage in front of a plain dark background,
he transcends the photojournalist mode, and with this transforms
his images into a cipher for the human condition per se.
Chien-Chi Chang was born in Taiwan in 1961 and studied at
Soochow University and Indiana University. His work has been
widely published and in 1999 he was awarded the Visa d'Or
for magazine photography in Perpignan and the W. Eugene Smith
Memorial fund for Humanistic Photography. Chang has been
a member of Magnum Photos since 1996 and lives in Taipei
and New York. The exhibition was presented at the Venice
Biennale in 2001 and at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 2002.
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