text by Abby CHEN
Inside the Palazzo Delle Prigioni of Venice in 2024, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan will present Yuan Goang-Ming’s solo exhibition Everyday War, an incisive introduction to living with the constant threat of apocalypse in the midst of a radical societal transition. The show synthesizes the artist’s anxiety and hope, evoking the notion of home and the search for “poetic dwelling” according to Martin Heidegger–a place of peace, safety and freedom. Through fictional metaphor and devotional documentary footage, the audience gains insight into the lesser-known daily life narrative from the perspective of a Taiwanese artist: how fear is individually experienced as a nightmarish reenactment and collectively processed through public assembly of mass community.
Taking the title from Yuan’s newest work, Everyday War features five videos, one kinetic installation, and one sketch. The eponymous piece depicts a military attack destroying a studio flat home. Filmed in live size on location, the cinematography is largely done through a horizontal hanging track newly engineered and programmed by the artist himself. It is showcased alongside two of his earlier pieces, Dwelling (2014) and Prophecy (2014), which progressively explore Yuan’s unresolvable anxiety within the domestic setting. He uses the term “uncanny” to describe what it means to live in the world today, a state of eerie suspense due to escalating tension geopolitically across the strait and conflicts everywhere.
Imagining a way out in such times of unpredictability and deterrence, Yuan will also debut his latest film Flat World (2023). Edited exclusively with footage from Street View in Google Maps, it marks Yuan’s first foray into extending his sense of place to the virtual world. He envisions it as a new kind of road movie, generated by algorithms and how it is shaping the world being known and felt. Contrary to classical road movies that value traveling away from home as a tangible form of escape, discovery and rebellion, Flat World shows information is not experience. The effortless access to visual information of a place makes it a “non-place,” a term coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé. A sense of sameness is the dominant feature of a flattened globe where there is no distinction between inside or outside. The once-romanticized leaving and returning are now trapped in the absence of curiosity, enlightenment, and exploration. Movement between origin and destination is meaningless without body orientation between the observer and the observed. As one might view such instantaneous connectivity as an answer to generate and safeguard new spaces, the collapse of time reduces any location that could shelter belongings to mere dots on a map.
Yuan Goang-Ming’s selection of the aforementioned works reveals his angst regarding apocalypse and technology. Like many Taiwanese born after World War II, Yuan’s upbringing was haunted by his father’s traumatic memories of war and sadness of displacement. The imagined violent encroachment of private space, which foregrounds the generational trepidation, is not only about Yuan’s personal struggle, but also resonates as a shared sense of impending doom among Taiwanese society.
Everyday Maneuver (2018), positioned at the gallery entrance, takes over the largest wall space and creates a purported blurring of boundaries between the simulated and real. Filmed during Taiwan’s annual Wanan Air Raid Drill, this video sets the tone for the entire exhibition with a strong sense of present danger. The shrill sound of a siren gives meaning to the sight of an empty city. During the island wide drill, it is estimated that the daytime population of Taipei City on a regular day is three and a half million, including Yuan and his family. Together they participate in a thirty-minute mass meeting with the age of fragility. Yuan points out that such a surreal spectacle comes from the most realistic landscape of his home city each year since 1978. Even though the drill brings all the streets to a silent halt, the video itself shows warning and order without displaying fear or rage. There is an underlying acceptance of danger as normal. It is as much about the seen as it is about the unseen. In a current world of intensified disasters and daily losses, what is hinted in the work is the Taiwanese practice emergency preparedness and build infrastructural resilience through government-civilian cooperation during the drill. In essence, this suggests a resilience that counters fragility — not just in times of catastrophe, but in any unimaginable event: a resilience demonstrated through cooperation in every neighborhood, every town, every city, every conversation, and every day.
Amidst this experience, looping on the same screen is Yuan’s parallel reality from The 561st Hour of Occupation (2014), a rare work from Yuan’s oeuvre that exemplifies how his art contributes to a specific political event that is about the clash between Taiwan’s decision makers and the people. More than a group portrait of the younger generation’s collective longing for freedom from fear, it is also Yuan’s added footnote with his own aesthetics to the spectrum of resistance archive of humankind.
In this epic work, Yuan documented the Sunflower movement in the spring of 2014 with the Taiwan anthem in slow-tempo in the background. During the movement, Taiwan Legislative Hall was transformed into a makeshift square and refuge. Here, the idea of home is examined through the charging and discharging of scenes, creating lingering phantom imagery of the student occupants. Much like Yuan himself, who is an integral part of Taiwan, the students rehearse their knowledge of and faith in their homeland. They not only perceive what is possible, but more importantly, demonstrate the actual possibilities. The work conveys the understanding that when the government belongs to the Taiwanese people, the Legislative Hall becomes a sanctuary and shelter. Otherwise, it is their prison to be enslaved and sacrificed.
The collection of these works displays an array of scenes in and outside of the home, deliberately devoid of any presence of people. As visitors explore the exhibition, they will be immersed in an atmosphere of unsettling isolation, as a spectator, or identifying with the artist’s fear and yearning? This intertwining multitude of home, encompasses host and guest, private and public spheres, physical and virtual realms, the imagined and lived experiences that each cannot exist without the other. It reflects an artist’s competing reality of living in Taiwan, where fear coexists with courage. In an era of great uncertainty and division, Yuan’s declaration of one’s own vulnerability is the very fortitude and truth that transforms into empathy and shared connectedness. The universal human condition of conflict perpetuates, so does the persistent search for the poetic essence. It is never settled in any dwelling. It lies in the moments of bravery, by those pursuing and acting.
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