Chang Shih-fei’s Spellbound

I first came across Chang Shih-fei’s work at the 2018 Tainan International Foto Festival, which featured his Sugar Mill No. 5, a series of photographs portraying Chang’s hometown, Fanziliao in Tainan City’s Madou District. Chang combined a loving treatment of family ties with a surreal take on the landscapes of his old home. The resulting images occupied a liminal space between affectionate family portraits and landscapes of absurdity and alienation.

Chang’s new series, Spellbound, reflects on his own religious beliefs, progressing from the theme of home in Sugar Mill No. 5 to the subject of religion. In the past few years, photographing temple fairs has given me the opportunity to observe Chang’s creative process at close quarters. He tends to move around the fringes of these religious events, waiting for the right moment to take a shot. Unlike many other photographers, however, Chang is less interested in climactic moments than in the ambiguities and in­determin­acies of his subjects. Rather than merely presenting faithful records of the rituals and performances at traditional temple fairs, he delves into the mythic nature of religion itself.

In pursuit of mysticism

In Sugar Mill No. 5, Chang adeptly plays with heterogeneity in order to give physical places a twist, using shadows that engender illusory spaces, indefinable objects that lurk within ordinary environments, reflected images that blur the boundaries between the real and the unreal, and unconventional contrasts between foregrounds and backgrounds that create a sense of incongruity. A comparable surrealist treatment also appears in Spellbound. For example, Chang’s photograph of the décor and lighting of a Taiwanese Opera performance makes us wonder whether the warped architectural images in it are real or not. Similarly, the shadows of food on the wall at a Ghost Festival feast whet our curiosity, and we cannot be certain whether the sculpture behind an array of votive lamps is of Buddha or Christ. To achieve an atmospheric twist, Chang contrasts cool-colored flowers with the warm tones of a Ghost Festival feast, thus smuggling a hint of death into the festive occasion. The juxtaposition of an actress and a real bridge summons up the image of an uncanny nighttime opera suspended in mid-air. There are also objects that are hardly describable, such as the heads of burning incense sticks blending with road markings, which suggests a sense of accident; in the picture that shows a human figure in front of a window and a strange flame, does the shadow on the wall hint at an out-of-body experi­ence? And then there is a person in a raincoat shrouded in a mysterious red light.

Theatricality is another feature of Spellbound. Chang creates unique visual spaces by carefully framing scenes. A stone lion facing a wall, a person sleeping, plates and cups scattered about on a table, and entangled electrical cables, constitute a remarkable portrait of a temple. At a temple feast, a chef looks mesmerized while savoring one of her culinary creations amidst haphazard gas cylinders. People participating in a religious procession take a rest in a dinosaur park. Scenes like these turn familiar temple fairs into absurd dramas that make us smile. Chang also captures those “spellbound” moments of apotheotic longings during spirit-­channeling rituals. For example, he intriguingly brings together a female spirit medium gazing skyward, another medium channeling the Queen Mother of the West, and an acolyte standing by observing. Both the spatial framing and the timing of this picture demonstrate Chang’s remarkable composure and precision as a photo­grapher.

Physical vs. metaphysical

The metaphysical theatricality of Spellbound does not merely lie in the atmospheres Chang has created. As Chang himself states, Spellbound considers issues raised by traditional temple fairs, such as the nature of the real and the unreal, of birth and death, and of living beings and specters. Rather than offering definite answers, Chang seeks to elicit questions. The people of Taiwan are descended from successive waves of immigration down the centuries, and Han people’s religious customs on this island have imbibed elements of other ethnic or foreign cultures, while their spiritual outlook embodies certain conventions and ideas of Confucianism and feudalism. As these customs are part of the fabric of everyday life, it is sometimes difficult for us to perceive their ideological makeup. But Chang’s work enables us to contemplate temple fairs and folk beliefs in a fresh way.

Chang focuses his gaze on the demeanor of people who gather together for religious purposes, capturing a mixture of contradictory things that make up this richly varied world: clamor and reticence, reality and fiction, life and death. Like the human figures in his photographs, he feels the sensory impact of the religious festivities and then experiences a sense of forlorn­ness when he returns to everyday reality. This process of passing from habitual reality to carnival­esque ecstasies, and then back to the mundane, is condensed in Chang’s tributes to those theatrical occasions where humans and gods come together to enjoy themselves.

As Chang states, “For me, whatever happens on these occasions originates in a connection between humans and their religions; it bespeaks the pull of a mystical power.” Chang finds it impossible to shake off the allure of this primordial mysticism, which is why he keeps returning to these religious sites to take photographs. Repeatedly undertaking these journeys, he wants his photographs to furnish evidence of his being spellbound by metaphysical forces.