text by Yuan Goang-Ming
We had always lived in darkness;
but a candle was lit and
we began to pursue illumination
in our quest for home and hearth.
In our growing obsession
with illumination,
we have forgotten that
home has always been in the dark.
—Heidegger
In my early childhood, when my father was still with us, he would often hum a few bars from Peking opera. I only found out when I was older that the opera he most often sang was Silang Visits His Mother. The story is set broadly during the war between the Northern Song and Liao. The Northern Song general Yang Silang was captured and betrothed to a Liao princess on account of his extraordinary deportment. Fifteen years later, enabled by circumstances, Silang was aided by the princess to slip across the border in the middle of the night to visit his queen mother and siblings, with a caveat to return by sunrise so he would not implicate the princess. Silang successfully passed through the city walls and saw his mother, but upon his return his ploy was discovered. He was charged with consorting with the enemy, and narrowly escaped a beheading. The bridge from this classic opera that my father most often hummed was, “I am like a caged bird, with wings that I cannot stretch. I am like a tiger away from the mountains, lone and suffering. I am like a wild goose northbound, lost and separated from my flock. I am like a dragon in shallow waters, stranded on a sandbank.”
My appreciation was mainly limited to the excellent rhyme and parallel construction of these lyrics. That is, until I had an opportunity to see this opera performed live with my father at the Armed Forces Cultural Center on Zhonghua Road in Taipei. When Silang was finally before his mother, he fell to his knees, overcome by the conflicting emotions of romantic love and familial love, of the enemy and the self. Kowtowing to his mother thrice, he broke down in tears, “Even if I supplicate you ten thousand times, I could never amend my sins…” In that moment, my father’s tears streamed down his face, and the other audience members all around us, many my father’s age, covered their faces and wept too. [1] It was then that I truly understood how this opera and the audience were connected through their own tragedies of that era. Yang Silang saw his mother after a mere 15 years of separation, while my father waited 40 long years until martial law was lifted only to see his sister — the only family he had left — in her dying embers.
In her book Big River, Big Sea — Untold Stories of 1949, author Lung Ying-Tai
interviewed a member of the Puyuma tribe, Wu Aji. He was abducted aboard a ship at the Kaohsiung Harbor by the Kuomintang (KMT) and arrived on the battlefields of China during the civil war between the KMT and the Communist Party of China (CPC). Eventually captured, he became a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army and was forced to point his gun toward his own homeland, and lived in Mainland China for the next 50 years. When asked by Lung, “In retrospect, what was the most tragic moment in your entire life?” Aji replied, “The moment when the ship set sail from the Kaohsiung Harbor.” [2]
My father boarded a ship bound for Taiwan at the age of 18, believing it was a temporary stay. But this temporary stay turned into 60 years. According to Associate Professor of History Rebecca Nedostup at Brown University in her essay “Defining Displacement: A Few Problems in Analyzing Wartime Refugees in China and Taiwan, 1937–1960,” the cohort that disembarked from the ship with my father were among those who had fled the civil war between the KMT and the CPC in 1949 to Taiwan alongside a large number of Chinese military personnel. This group was initially labeled “loyalists” (in political science) and then “mainlanders” (in cultural geography), but the identity of these “displaced persons” of the Cold War is“refugees” (in sociology). [3] According to this sociological categorization, I would be considered among the second generation of the civil war-era refugees in the great migration of 1949.
Throughout world history, “when the ship sets sail” often evokes separation and tragedy. For instance, the image that rendered the whole world speechless: of the three-year-old refugee, Alan, whose corpse was washed up on Turkish shores; or of the boat full of Rohingya refugees that sunk off the coast of Bangladesh. According to UNHCR statistics, the number of people currently displaced because of war or religion now far exceeds the number during World War II. Surrounded by a world that leaves us discouraged and disconcerted, a poetic dwelling seems to be even further out of reach. Home is no longer a warm and concrete concept.
Since the “City Disqualified” series in 2000, I have attempted to manifest Taiwan as a typical hybrid city that constantly mutates against its unique historical and political background, or to manifest a state of being where Taiwan is impossible to define or locate. “The place of ideal perfection must be elsewhere, not here.” Home has become a fluid and fragile concept. Hence, from 2007 to 2011, I attempted to capture the quotidian nature of “home” through an autobiographical and theatrical approach in the “Disappearing Landscape” series.
My solo exhibition Tomorrowland (2018) continues to explore the themes in An Uncanny Tomorrow (2014), expanding from the environment where we live to the world at large. With the resurgence of the Cold War and populist ideologies, the threat of imperialism and terrorism, and drastic environmental changes, a home for tomorrow and into the future is no longer a stable concept. Pivoting around “everyday warfare,” Tomorrowland consists of works that are closely interconnected: from the blinding flash of light that symbolizes a nuclear explosion, to the air raid drills that continue post-martial law; from Disneyland representing globalization, the “nonplace,” and imperial capitalism, to transnational migrant workers in search of a better life — all in an attempt to echo the anxieties and apprehensions of our convoluted world. Now in retrospect of my earliest video works in 1985 and 1987[4], it seems as though my practice has come full circle.
For the past 33 years, I have contemplated the possibilities of the image, and have experimented with various media in my practice. The works Towards Darkness and Towards Light on view in this solo exhibition are my latest creative attempts: an utterly dark space and an entirely white space, both are my ultimate reflections on the nature of the image. Simultaneously, they demonstrate the possibilities of human corporeal perception and experience of the image, as well as immersive live exhibition. If the image is embodied through “light” in Towards Light, what would this image become when light is pushed to the extreme without carrying any imagery or symbol, simply returning to the purest form of light itself? When the impurities of the image are extracted from light, how would we view and debate this “pure image”? If the image is embodied through “light” in Towards Darkness, do possibilities exist for that image to become an apparition of another image on the perceptual and spiritual level, in that pitch-dark, nether worldly state where light has been eliminated from human retinas?
By removing all imagery in Towards Darkness, I attempt to conjure the earliest nether state of human existence while incorporating all of the worldly phenomena described above. This primordial state of being is like floating directionless in the sea; or as though entering a black hole. However, in the progression toward that black hole, we are perhaps able to confirm our existence from within. Like Heidegger’s reversal of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, using darkness to represent phenomena, and using illumination to represent essence (ideology), he attempted to tell us we had always lived in darkness; but a candle was lit and we began to pursue illumination in our quest for home and hearth. In our growing obsession with illumination, we have forgotten that home has always been in the dark. [5]
Tomorrowland
Yuan Goang-Ming Solo Exhibition
3 March - 29 April 2018
Gallery TKG+
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1. A viewing experience similar to mine was described in Big River, Big Sea — Untold Stories of 1949, Lung Ying-Tai, Ink Publishing, July 13, 2015, pp. 68–69.
2. Ibid, p.256.
3.“Defining Displacement: A Few Problems in Analyzing Wartime Refugees in China and Taiwan, 1937– 1960,” Rebecca Nedostup, associate professor of history of Brown University, Academic Seminars for Global Chinese Studies, Center for Chinese Studies, National Central Library, Taipei, Taiwan, December 17, 2010.
4. In my first single-channel video work About Millet’s The Angelus (1985), the video was filled with suspicion for the wonderful scenes presented in The Angelus and an inexplicable atmosphere of unease. In 1987, the video in my first video installation work, Out of Position included: an airplane crash and wreckage, space shuttle and comet, soldiers getting shot, close-up of a Nazi officer, a mother weeping by a child’s grave, Vietnam War, and violent protests, execution by shooting in 1944, burning bodies, and lynching of black South Africans. The background music was Laurie Anderson’s song, “O Superman (For Massenet)” (1981), an anti-war song she wrote in response to the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis.
5. Heidegger outlines his reinterpretation of Plato’s cave allegory in his book The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, published by Continuum, 2002.
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