Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan presents the Collateral Event Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, to be held at the Palazzo delle Prigioni. This year’s exhibition is presented by pioneering Taiwanese video artist Yuan Goang-Ming and curated by Chinese-American curator Abby Chen, showcasing artworks including video, kinetic installations and sketches, and featuring two new works specially created for the Biennale Arte 2024. Responding to this year’s curatorial theme, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, the exhibi- tion will depict the doubts and unrest hidden beneath our beautiful world as a metaphor for the inherent state of loss human feel in constant displace- ment, with nowhere to truly belong. In the show, Yuan Goang-Ming contemplates potential conflicts in daily life and explores states of existence and unease in contemporary society. The exhibition will be open to the public from 20 April to 24 November 2024, along with a series of opening events, including public forum and live performance, taking place on Thursday 18 April 2024.
In the exhibition venue, a dark viewing space is set up with sofas in a home-like setting: reflecting the viewer’s emotions and evoking the fear of losing dwelling as a constant in one’s life. At the same time, it also shows the artist’s interest in home, living, and the uncanny tomorrow. These works are re- flections of past and present fables while also being prophecy of mankind. Curator Abby Chen believes they exemplify the importance of Yuan Goang- Ming’s works, which are irreplaceable: “for Yuan Goang-Ming, an artist who was born, raised, and currently residing in Taiwan, all this is his reality.”
Since Yuan Goang-Ming’s first video work was created in 1985, he has gone on to create works using various media and techniques to explore “the possibilities of images” throughout his career in the last four decades. He often interferes with seemingly ordinary spaces, inspired by turning his internal anxiety and confusion into a calm and poetic gaze, characteristic of his work. Recently, his creative gaze has expanded beyond the island on which he resides and into the wider world. As with all changes and crises that arise in politics, technology, economy, and social structures, the future of life and the wish for a stable residence has become both increasingly challenging and desirable.
This exhibition will unveil two new video works by Yuan Goang-Ming that apply new techniques and were created specially for the Biennale Arte 2024:
- The exhibition’s eponymous piece, “Everyday War”, continues the artist’s exploration of the unpredictability and instability present in everyday life. Beneath the idyllic facade of a middle-class home, unknown attack destroy the entire room, leaving it in ruins in the aftermath of war before slowly returning to its peaceful state. Differing from previous methods of using model explosions, the artist employs a self-developed single-axis “motion control system” with precise programming control. Using high-speed cameras filming multiple shots in a live size set at 240 frames per second, the scenes and fragments are added together and combined in post-production using 3D scanning and modeling.
- His other new piece, titled “Flat World”, utilizes images from Google Street View’s database. Using AI technology to search for images on Google and conduct other forms of research, the artist finds similar street views from around the world then connects them together – forming an ongoing loop of landscapes. This piece resembles a new “road movie” created through internet computing techniques with the artist questioning the ever-chang- ing relationships between people and place under globalization through technology.
This exhibition will also include four classic works by Yuan Goang-Ming, guiding the audience to reflect upon themselves by collectively conveying the unpredictability and vulnerability of life in a time where conflict and fragility have become the norm:
- In “Everyday Maneuver”, Yuan Goang-Ming uses five drones simultaneously positioned directly above the five main roads of Taipei City. Through surveillance cameras, he records the “Wanan Air Defense Drill” — a series of annual air defense drills that have been conducted in Taiwan since 1978, even after the lifting of martial law in 1987. The empty city, like a movie scene, is a metaphor for geopolitical instability and threats.
- “Dwelling” is one of the artist’s most iconic video works. The title of the piece is derived from German philosopher Martin Heidegger, referencing a poem by Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin in 1951. In “Dwelling”, Yuan Goang-Ming constructs a utopic living room setting, theatrically amplifying unexpected explosions and playing them in reverse. Through this loop of images, the artist forces viewers to confront their inner anxieties and wor- ries about the loss of a secure home, embodying the cyclical nature of destruction and hope.
- “The 561st Hour of Occupation” was filmed by Yuan Goang-Ming in response to an invitation from students, documenting the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement in Taiwan. During the nearly month-long occupation of the Legislative Yuan, the legislative chamber became a temporary shelter for participants students who sought a better future for their homeland by politically representing themselves. The artist reverses and slows down the national anthem, using it as a soundtrack, and presenting an atmosphere of “sacrifice” and “sacredness”.
- The exhibition’s only kinetic installation piece, “Prophecy”, features a dining table reminiscent of a still-life painting, with pure white porcelain ta- bleware and glass cups placed on top. As sound that accompanies the piece ruptures the space with violent shaking, the once silent scene suddenly transforms into one of conflict, alluding to the potential that all things can be instantly destroyed.
Yuan Goang-Ming, who focuses on the conceptual nature of video art, reflects on his creative journey, stating, “from the dining table as a premonition of symbolic collapse, civil movements, ongoing defense drills after the lifting of martial law, and the ‘non-place’ under globalization, to various domes- tic scenes – all of these attempts to express the anxieties and unease of the complex world we live in. Looking back at my early video works, the core themes of this solo exhibition, it seems they form a seamless cycle that returns to its origin.”
Abby Chen further emphasizes that in this era where impermanence is the norm, “the artist continuously explores what it means to exist, to be alive, to be at peace, to be safe, to be free, and what it means to be poetic.” However, these questions also reflect Yuan Goang-Ming’s deeper impenetrable inner landscape. It is the poetic desire in his heart that allows individuals to find “a realm of freedom, an exclusive place in the wilderness, where an individu- al’s essence can remain at peace with unchanging freedom.”
During the opening week of the Biennale Arte 2024, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan Collateral Event will be accompanied by a series of public events on 18 April 2024. One of the events is the public forum titled “Thinking Like an Island”, which will take place from 4pm to 5pm. The forum will feature artist Yuan Goang-Ming; curator Abby Chen; assistant curator of Contemporary Art & Programs at Asian Art Museum, Naz Cuguoğlu; adjunct curator, Asia-Pacific at Tate Modern, Hera Chan; and curator at Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum, Birde Tang, who will engage in a discussion on contem- porary geopolitical dynamics. In addition, artist and curator Joud Al-Tamimi, along with artist Ali Yass, will present their live performance titled “Go Tell It to The Mountain”. More activities and further details will be announced in due course.