This article examines Chang Chao-tang’s photography in its social and cultural contexts and reads his photographic images with a special focus on the temporal–spatial syntax at work: “superimpositions” between “the sculptural” and/over the natural, the still life and/over the transi- ent, and so on. Through this two-pronged analysis of both the social–historical and the formal, the article addresses questions regarding how Chang’s photographs manage to be both “Surrealist” and “real,” and how exactly Surrealist imagery and the social documentary work together in his art.