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We've all watched as the collective pressure of a wedding transforms normally reasonable folk into lunatics. But Chien-Chi Chang has taken that experience a step further—he's making art out of the insanity. In his 2002 book I Do, I Do, I Do, the Taiwan-born, New York-based photographer cast a jaundiced eye on the florid excesses of the wedding industry in his native island: the countless gaudy outfits thrown on and off for the wedding portrait, the banquet dinner that could fill the hangar of an aircraft carrier. Chang's perceptive photos showed the ordinary, exhausted people buried beneath the heavy makeup, the costumes, the confetti, the expectations. In his newest book Double Happiness, Chang digs deeper, documenting the made-to-order marriages of Taiwan men and their Vietnamese brides—virtual strangers until the day they say, "I do."

Chang, a 44-year-old photographer who occasionally works for TIME, tracked several agencies that hook up Taiwan men with Vietnamese women desperate to secure a better life, even if it means leaving their native land forever. Brokered marriages across borders are not unusual in Asia. The wives of many Japanese farmers, for example, are mail-order brides from the Philippines. But the Taiwan-Vietnam connection has proved particularly robust, yielding some 80,000 such couplings over the past decade. Chang followed the men to Ho Chi Minh City, where they're shown an array of young women preselected by marriage agencies. If a man chooses one of the girls and she accepts, it's a very brief engagement—the wedding usually takes place within three days. This is matrimony at its most mercantile: sucking in strangers and churning out brides and grooms, complete with photo albums and triple-layered cakes.

Double Happiness follows the workings of this assembly line. In the first section the women are presented in small, uncomfortable groups, preparing themselves for the potential humiliation of the selection process. Some appear surprisingly old—more, startlingly young—and almost all avoid the camera's gaze. Once the men have made their picks, the future couples and current strangers pass through immigration and brief counseling. As they absorb lectures on culture shock and communication, no one says a word to each other—no one even looks at each other—but Chang makes their body language easy to read. He captures the physical atmosphere of apprehension and awkwardness generated by two very different people suddenly cast together, for better or worse. We can feel the effort of will required by both bride and groom to continue down this path. The women cannot keep their anxiety at bay—they'll be the ones moving to a foreign land, cut off from everything they know. The men look befuddled. Chang ends with photos shot at the weddings, including some of the most graceless embraces ever captured on film.

The weddings Chang documents seem to have little in common with Western traditional notions of what a marriage should be: a photogenic celebration of love between soul mates, suitable for framing. These brokered arrangements are cross-border business transactions between a rich place and a poor country, set up to meet a consumer demand: man wants a wife; woman wants a better life. But ultimately the commodity being traded is the desire to find happiness with another, a wish embodied in every wedding, even ones with plastic champagne glasses and fake flowers. Chang exposes the tinsel promises of the marriage industry, but he leaves his subjects their humanity—and their hope.

• Bryan Walsh
• Photographer Chien-Chi Chang follows the conveyor belt of brokered marriages in Double Happiness