Author:Chang Chien-Chi (1961-)

Category：Photograph

Year：1993~1999

Size:Length:157.4 x Width:106.6 (cm)

Weight:1650g

Introduction：This portrait series is printed at life-size scale. The figures stand upright, most often in pairs, bound together with iron chains. Most are patients with mental illness, from Lung Fa Tang in Luzhu, Kaohsiung. This folk religious organization sheltering people with mental disorders was founded by local villager Li Kun-Tai, whose Dharma name is Shih Kai-Feng. Li first took in a patient and tied him to himself with a straw rope so they could work and live together; over time, the patient’s behavior became more regulated, and more families sent relatives with mental illness to Lung Fa Tang. Owing to a shortage of caregivers, he bound patients with more severe conditions to those with milder symptoms using a “chains of emotions,” so they could monitor one another and prevent escape, restrain each other through close contact, and, through physical labor, learn to manage their conditions. Chang Chien-Chi photographed residents of Lung Fa Tang bound to one another by the “chains of emotions.” Dressed in similar clothing and with similar crew cuts, they stand before a monochrome backdrop that reveals nothing of the location, as if undergoing examination or investigation.

Between 1993 and 1999, Chang started noticing Lung Fa Tang’s “chains of emotions” therapy, and over more than twenty shoots, he produced forty paired portraits. He deliberately set the “chains of emotions” that restrains the two people at the center of the frame; whether they stand near or far, high or low, with vacant, playful, or displeased expressions, they are tightly bound together by the chain. The Chain has already departed from the objectivity pursued by early documentary photography; instead, through the direct gaze of Lung Fa Tang’s residents, it lays bare their circumstances, and by the deliberate emphasis on the “chain,” makes it a metaphor for human relationships. In 2014, he directed the series as the moving-image work Side Chain, which cites Dostoevsky’s line: “Limiting the people around a man will not make him sane.”

—— Hsu Chu-Chun, Research Project on the Interpretation of Photographic Works, 2020.

Media and Techniques：Gelatin silver print

Accession number:NCP2016-029-0010