Chien-Chi Chang
About the artist
Chien-Chi Chang’s photography and films explore the abstract concepts of alienation and connection. His investigation of the ties that bind one person to another draws on his own deeply divided immigrant experience as he explores the contrasting themes of hope and darkness, as well as restriction and freedom. These themes surface particularly in The Chain, a collection of portraits made in a Taiwanese mental institution. An exhibition of these nearly life-sized photographs has toured internationally and has been exhibited at venues including the Venice Biennale and the Biennal de São Paulo. Chang has documented many people in fearful uncertainty: internally displaced Rohingya in Myanmar, the European refugee crisis, the war in Ukraine, Hong Kong democracy activists, and North Korean defectors escaping through China and Laos to Thailand and South Korea. This purgatory is something Chang, who was born in Taiwan in 1961, knows intimately. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Soochow University in 1984 and his Master’s from Indiana University in 1990. He began his career as a photojournalist at the Seattle Times in 1991. For decades, Chang has photographed the bifurcated lives of Chinese immigrants in New York along with those of their families back home in Fujian. China Town was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2009 and the International Center of Photography in 2012. In recent years, Chang has begun to include sound and moving images in his museum exhibitions, which have enriched his narratives. “Still images can be moving, and moving images can be still,” he says. “Both meet within a soundscape.”
Work being shown at ATM
Name: Elsewhere is a Verb (2025)
Location: The Link Gallery
Media: six videos, chromogenic print
Description: The photographer’s work engages with urgent social realities shaping trans-Asia: North Korean defectors, human-snake immigrants, foreign brides, the shifting urban fabric of Phnom Penh, and the contested origins of photography in Asia itself. Developed through video, sound, and image, these projects probe the precarious conditions of border crossing, where migration, exile, desire, and fear are not fixed endpoints but ongoing actions that continually reconfigure subjectivity. The photographed subject together with the artist’s own presence asserts a restless trajectory, an archive of lives in motion where systems of value are constituted through states of transformation. The unhomeliness that emerges signals each subject’s refusal to be contained within the necropolitical structures of national, historical, or cultural governance.
