Tchan followed Lang's example in montage works which printed several negatives into one image in order to evoke a Chinese painting.
For instance, in the early 1950s, Tchan produced photographs which used the “one corner” pictorial style of the Song dynasty painter Ma Yuan (1189-1224).
Although still pursuing photography as an amateur, after returning to Hong Kong in 1955, Tchan traveled to many countries on photographic expeditions, including Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia.
In these photographs Tchan declared that his new ambition was to portray "the real object in collaboration with the skill of pictorial depiction," that is, to show the lives of ordinary people in vivid and aesthetically rigorous images.
[4] Although the period of political turmoil during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and early 1970s was not productive for him, by the 1980s Tchan had developed an interest in ethnic photography and worked to encourage photo tourism to China's minority areas.