In 1944, Tchan moved to Vietnam in order to run a trading business but spent more and more time with photography. One of his most important influences was Lang Jingshan (1892-1995), whose photography was rooted in Chinese painting. 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. In 1959 and 1962 he returned to China, and photographed the classic landscapes of Guilin and Huangshan. In a 1962 essay, Chinese Pictorial Painting and Landscape Photography Tchang argued that restricting himself to black-and-white was similar to the three-dimensional textures and forms of Chinese paintings and that his use of space simplified the structures and enhanced the viewer's sense of solidity and emptiness.