The theme of chain/disintegration of family keeps appearing in Chang’s works; it seems that Chang tries to establish the archive of the chain/disintegration of family relationship in cross-cultural perspective by traversing the social fantasy. In I Do I Do I Do, he challenges the fantasy of wedding rituals in Taiwan by looking awry at the scenes in wedding. He shows that there is no free choice for the couples to decide how their wedding pictures are; further, their going through public wedding rituals is indeed the act to fulfill the other’s desire in order to be recognized in the society, instead of making their fairytale dreams come true. Thus, if marriage is the possible foundation of a new family, it is split already since it is established on fantasy.
It is likely that part of the reasons for the fantasy to be traversed is because that Chang, who has lived abroad for about five years when he starts the project, is to some extent an outsider of the new local wedding rituals in Taiwan. There is a distance between his stance and the new local culture of wedding.
Such is a similar case in Double Happiness, in which Chang deals with the beginning of the cross-cultural marriage between Taiwanese men and Vietnamese women. The marriage is already a split with two strange individuals from two different cultures and societies. They run into the structure of fantasy in order to solve the real problems that can not be dealt with in reality. They try to establish a new chain of family but this chain is split when it is connected. The object of their desire appears and is lost at the same time50 since they are in the structure of fantasy. Thus, marriage, as the possible foundation of a new family, appears to be split in Chang’s works.
If in the two books mentioned above Chang presents that the chain has been split since the beginning, in The Chain, Chang shows that the chain as fantasy, is to control the social monstrosity and sustain the disintegrated society. The patients in Long Fa Tang Temple are chained by the Chain of Compassion, which forces them to live together like families. Chang presents the social sinthome in these clear, frontal whole-length portraits so that we readers meet the real contradiction in the society. He sees the core of the chain as the sustentation of their disintegrated family, which sends them
50 “This coincidence of emergence and loss, of course, designates the fundamental paradox of the Lacanian objt petit a which emerges as being-lost—narrativization occludes this paradox by describing the process in which the object is first given and then get lost” (Žižek, “Seven” 13).
to the asylum in order to keep the family as a whole, and that of the new family, in which they are forced to be chained together. Chang leads us to see the paradox: for the former, it is because their families send them to Long Fa Tang Temple that their original family is not complete; for the later, it is this iron chain that proves this family is forced to connect physically without based on blood and psychological connection. Chang starts this project when he has been away from home for four or five years; he is curious about the life in this local asylum and he wants to find out the situation by himself (Juan 7). The connection between him and local Taiwan51 is re-established in the process of taking the series of photographs. And it is very likely that the distance in between leads Chang to traverse the social fantasy and sees the issue with a new perspective.
The theme of family can also be seen in “Family Album”52 and the series of photographs relating to Chinatown: in both cases, the chain is split. In
“Family Album,”53 Chang takes photographs on the family trip back to Wuri
51 Chang says, “When I finished my studies in America in 1993, I really felt like coming back to Taiwan because I had been away from home for 4 or 5 years. The existence of Lung Fa Tang, a very special phenomenon, indicates some problems hidden in the dark corners of Taiwan” (Juan 7). The previous commentaries do not mention this relation between Chang and the environment so that I clarify this point here.
52 Some of the photographs have been published in Time Asia. The series of photographs has been exhibited in Taipei MOMA Online from 6 Dec. 2003 through 15 Jan. 2004. Lin, Chi-Ming has written a commentary on this series of photographs.
Chang, “Time Bends” 72-7; Chang, “Family Album”; Lin, “Feeling” c8.
53 Since this series of photographs is not published in book form, I do not discuss it
village, where he was born and lived till six years old (Chang, “Vanished”).
In this series of photographs, we do not see the stereotypical images of harmonious family gathering but meet the scenes cut from an angle. It seems that Chang does not want to face the village and his family directly since what they are is no longer what they were. As he lives in the United States for more than ten years, he is likely to be the outsider in his family.
The chain is split in the cross-regional (from Wuri to Taichung City) and cross-cultural (from Taiwan to America) experiences and the photographs somehow appear as the chain to connect what is split in reality. As for the project of Chinatown, Chang starts in 1992 and he is still working on it.54 Chang entitles the series of photographs “Divided Lives,” 55 which photograph the lives of some families on different lands: one side is the illegal immigrants (mostly men) who live in the tenements in the Chinatown in New
carefully in this study. However, it is worth for future researchers to pay attention to.
Chang shoots this series of photographs in 2003, after he is famous and becomes the full member of Magnum. At this stage, he starts to look back at his family and his hometown. It is an obvious beginning of his self-reflection.
54 Since this project has not been done, I can not include the detailed discussion in this study. I really recommend the future researchers to study carefully this series of photographs. It is Chang’s long-term concerns. Thus, in this series of photographs, we may tell how Chang’s photographs change from making efforts on composing and framing the pictures to presenting simple portraits. Then, the subject of Chinatown seems very important for Chang himself. Chang says, “Mentally, Chinatown was the most difficult” (Lassiter 20). “Ever since I was a kid, I had heard about New York’s Chinatown. It’s a very mysterious place—almost a nation unto itself—so I knew it would be a difficult place to photograph. But I also felt that I shared a kind of loneliness with the people there” (Brown 49).
55 Chang showed some of the photographs in his address.
York City, earning a living and sending the money back to China; the other side is their families (the immigrants’ wives and children) who live in Mainland China with the money sent back from New York. Chang’s photographs directly show that the chain between the two sides is disconnected and each side establishes the other chain (as fantasy) to sustain themselves. Most importantly, Chang’s photographs seem to be another chain that comes to connect the family members in different lands. Some of the persons even see their family in the other continents through Chang’s photographs. His photographs appear to help them re-establish the family chain again.
There is a repetition of the theme in Chang’s works. Although he takes so many photographs to reflect different issues, all of them have much to do with the chain/disintegration of family. Also, when each time the theme repeats, it involves different people, different conditions, different interrelationship, and different chain/disintegration. I Do I Do I Do and Double Happiness deal with marriage, in which the chain is split since the beginning; The Chain concerns the non-families who are forced to live together like families by the iron chain; “Family Album” and “Divided Lives”
focus on the family, in which the chain has disconnected in the cross-cultural
experiences but re-establishes in/by photographs. If the symptom is a
“return of the repressed” (Freud, “Repression” 154) and it would keep returning, the repetition of the theme can be the symptoms of the society, which present similar problems or fantasies in different conditions. Chang, by the symptomatic reading of the society, traverses the social fantasy, which considers the family and the society as a whole, and reveals the condition in each issue based on his own observation. In other words, while the social fantasy tells us that the chain is connected, Chang’s photographs traverse the fantasy so that we see the chain as split.