The Instant of Gaze: Portraits by Chang Chao-Tang

A surreal uninhibited adventure between two boys, their mysterious love interest and two Japanese monks in the Tang dynasty. Feature debut by the acclaimed scriptwriter Chiu Kang-Chien.

A woman resorts to prostitution out of hunger and commits suicide shortly after, leaving her daughter to embark on an equally cruel path.

A short documentary directed by Chang Chao-Tang (張照堂) while working as a cameraman at China Television Company (中國電視公司), produced for the television program News Highlights (新聞集錦). The film documents the group exhibition “Womangraphy” (「女展」), organized by V-10 (Group Visual-10).

"The Beauty of Rituals" (《祭典之美》) by Chang Chao-tang (張照堂) surveys Taiwanese folk festivals across regions and seasons, framing them through the perspectives of archaeologist Chen Chi-lu (陳奇祿), choreographer Lin Hwai-min (林懷民), psychologist Yu Te-hui (余德慧), and painter Shiy De-jinn (席德進). The script and voiceover by Chiang Hsun (蔣勳) articulate the symbolic and affective dimensions of traditional belief.With music by Ma Shui-long (馬水龍), Chou Wen-chung (周文中), Kitaro (喜多郎), and Mike Oldfield, the film juxtaposes Eastern and Western sonic forms, re-mediating ritual as a dynamic contemporary cultural field.

In 1994 HUANG Hua-cheng showed his 8mm film Experiment 002 during a seminar titled ‘Theater Quarterly and Me’ at the Chinese Taipei Film Archive. This film is a recording of the seminar, documenting how the film was played and the seminar proceedings. HUANG passed away in 1996, and his earlier films have been lost.

The Pasta’ay, which means "the festival of the legendary little people," is a significant ritual held every other year in the Saisiat aborigine group in Taiwan. Every ten years, they hold the Great Ritual. This film focuses on the Great Ritual in 1986. It tries to convey the Saisiat people’s affection for and belief in the legendary little people. At the same time, the film brings into light Saisiat people’s ambivalence towards tourist invasion, and their dilemma of being caught between tradition and modernization. Structured by the Pasta’ay songs’ movements, the film breaks down to 15 chapters. It carefully juxtaposes the visual with the aural elements, which are conveyed in the conceptual dichotomy between “the real” and “the artificial.”

My Nostalgia, My Songs is a poetic documentary centered on Lin Hwai-min’s landmark dance work for Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. The music, curated by iconic photographer Chang Chao-tang, weaves Taiwanese folk melodies into reflections on urban migration and collective memory. Through the cinematography and editing of Christopher Doyle, the stage becomes a cinematic space, transforming performance into a sensory meditation on Taiwanese identity and cultural displacement in the 1980s.

Early collaboration between Chang Chan-tang and Christopher Doyle documenting the friendship of their inner circle in Taiwan during the early 80s.

An in-depth documentary on the reclusive Taiwanese artist Huang Hua-Cheng and his avant-garde legacy. Commissioned by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum for the retrospective exhibition: “An Open Ending: Huang Hua-Cheng” (2020).

The “Sai Jhu Gong” (賽豬公, Sacred Pig Competition) is a major annual ritual associated with the Sansia Ancestor Master Temple (三峽祖師廟), held each year on the sixth day of the first lunar month. This film documents the ceremonial proceedings of the 1973 “Sai Jhu Gong” (賽豬公) observance. Dispensing with narration altogether, the film’s soundscape consists exclusively of Beiguan (北管) music and liturgical recitation (祭儀口白). In terms of audiovisual construction and thematic orientation, the work may be understood as a transitional piece within the folklore-oriented documentary practice of Chang Chao-Tang (張照堂), situated between the more conventionally structured The Homecoming Pilgrimage of Dajia Mazu (大甲媽祖回娘家, 1974) and the more formally experimental The Boat Burning Festival (王船祭典, 1979).

This dance film presents Siddhartha as reimagined by Lin Hwai-min and performed by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, directed for screen by Chang Chao-Tang. Inspired by Hesse’s novel and a pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha attained enlightenment, Lin created a work of stillness and elemental force. The stage is shaped by tons of golden rice grains into shifting landscapes—like rain, waterfalls, and deserts. Georgian folk songs flow through the space as dancers, carrying wooden staffs, move in slow, spiraling journeys, while a monk in white remains motionless. In the final scene, a dancer rakes the grains into vast concentric circles, forming an image of quiet intensity. Premiered in 1994, this 90-minute work is one of Lin’s key creations. Widely toured and acclaimed, it remains among Cloud Gate’s most performed works. Recorded in high definition, this 2013 version stands as the definitive edition of this landmark piece.

An intimate two-person portrait of painter Hsieh Hsiao-te (謝孝德) and his illiterate, self-taught sculptor father Hsieh Chin-shou (謝金壽), exploring urban-rural tensions, generational differences, and divergences in their choice of media. A short documentary from Chang Chao-tang’s (張照堂) tenure on the China Television Company’s News Highlights (新聞集錦) program.

This landmark 1981–82 documentary series consists of weekly 25-minute episodes filmed across Taiwan using an ENG (Electronic News Gathering) camera. It documents local customs and social textures through a distinctly humanistic lens. The project also marks an early collaboration between Christopher Doyle and Chang Chao-Tang.

This short documentary portrays Chang Yingwu (1921–1984), a man whose extraordinary body became a site where medicine, spectacle, and state power intersected. Born in Beijing and later relocated to Taiwan, Chang lived with acromegaly, reaching a height far beyond ordinary human scale. Once exhibited, later enlisted, and eventually turned into a public figure through sport and media, his life traces how an anomalous body is disciplined, displayed, and normalized by social institutions. Filmed with restraint rather than sensationalism, the work observes Chang’s daily gestures and silences, allowing his presence to expose the fragile boundary between individuality and social gaze.

During his period working in Taiwan, Christopher Doyle made this experimental short film documenting the families of friends around him. This film received an Honorable Mention at the 4th Golden Harvest Awards (1981).

"Wild Cursive" is the third piece of Taiwanese dancer and choreographer Lin Hwai-min's Cursive trilogy, a captivating series translating the development of the fascinating art form of Chinese calligraphy into dance. As Lin says himself, the final part marks the climax of the trilogy, because it corresponds to the completely detached, free and highly abstract forms of “spontaneous” calligraphy. The performance contains elements of Tai Chi and is musically accompanied by compositions by Jim Shum and Liang Chun-mei. The performance was recorded in 2009 at the National Theater in Taipei, Taiwan.