Chang Chien-Chi reveals abstract concepts of alienation and connection in his work. His collection of portraits made in a mental asylum in Taiwan, caused a sensation when it was shown at the La Biennale di Venezia (2001), the Bienal de Sao Paolo (2002) and printed in the book The Chain (2002). The shocking, nearly life-sized photographs of pairs of patients literally chained together resonate with Chang's jaundiced look at the less visible bonds of marriage. He has treated marital ties in two books - I do I do I do (2001), a collection of images depicting alienated grooms and brides in Taiwan, and in Double Happiness (2005), a brutal depiction of the business of selling brides in Vietnam. The ties of family and of culture are also the themes of an ambitious project begun in 1992. For 16 years, Chang has photographed the bifurcated lives of Chinese immigrants in New York's Chinatown, along with those of their wives and families back home in Fujian. A work in progress, China Town is shown here for the first time. Among many other publications, his work has also been published in I Grandi Fotografi Magnum Photos Chien-Chi Chang (2006).

Chang's investigation of the ties that bind one person to another draws on his own deeply divide immigrant experience. Born in Taiwan, Chang studied at Soochow University (BA 1984) and at Indiana university (MS 1990). He joined the prestigious photo agency Magnum in 1995 and now lives with his wife in Taipei and in New York City.

Vicki Goldberg is the author of Light Matters: Writings on Photography (2005), The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives (1991) and editor of Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (1981). In 1997 she was the recipient of the International Center of Photography's prestigious Infinity Award. For over a decade, Goldberg wrote regular articles on photography and the arts for the New York Times; she continues to write numerous books as well as articles for Vanity Fair, Aperture, American Photo and other publications.

Xiang Biao, PhD, is a Research Council United Kingdom Academic Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Studying migration and social change in China, India and Australia over the last decade, he is the author of Transcending Boundaries (Chinese, 2000; English, 2005), Global 'Body Shopping' (2006), Making Order from Transnational Migration (forthcoming) and over 30 articles in both English and Chinese.

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.