Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War

Shown in an alternating sequence, the films Everyday Maneuver (2018) and The 561st Hour of Occupation (2014) open Everyday War, the solo exhibition by Yuan Goang-Ming (b.1965) in Venice as part of the 60th Biennale FIG.1. A large projection screen illuminates a dimly lit room on the first floor of the Palazzo delle Prigioni, a former prison connected to the Palazzo Ducale, which has been the venue for Taiwan’s collateral events at the biennale since 1995. The two films situate, in different ways, the reality of ‘everyday war’ in Taiwan, a territory with contested geopolitical status. Following heavy losses in the Chinese Civil War after the end of Japanese colonisation in 1949, Kuomintang forces retreated to Taiwan with the Republic of China (ROC) government, while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland, claiming to be the sole ruling government of China. For those living in the territory, the rising tensions and threat of war from the CCP continue to be an everyday reality. In the context of the international art festival, this contentious political status is reflected in Taiwan’s representation as the regional host of a collateral event, rather than a national pavilion.¹ 

Filmed at the behest of Yuan’s students at the Taipei National University of the Arts, The 561st Hour of Occupation pans slowly over Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan during the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement.² In the artist’s footage of the nearly month-long occupation of the legislative chamber, the unarmed, young adults are depicted as ordinary people embroiled in a perilous situation. Scenes of them gathered, chanting, speaking and clapping are interspersed with images of the empty hall, which bears the traces of protest, including banners and signs. Replacing the students’ rallying cries, a slowed-down version of the Taiwanese national anthem adds a dramatised solemnity to the film. On the far wall of the chamber, a portrait of Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), the revolutionary heralded as the founding father of modern China, hangs in front of the flag of Taiwan. This is surrounded by caricatures of the then-Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou (b.1950), alongside a handwritten hourly tally of the occupation and signs that criticise the passing of the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement (CSSTA), which, according to one banner, the president ‘forced the parliament to pass [...] within 3 seconds’ FIG.2. Although the Sunflower Student Movement mainly protested these undemocratic terms, there was also resistance towards the CSSTA itself, which aimed to liberalise trade between Taiwan and the PRC, due to a fear of the CCP’s encroachment in areas that could undermine Taiwan’s national security, such as transportation, telecommunications and publishing.

The end of the six-minute film fades into Everyday Maneuver FIG.3, in which aerial footage of the eerily still and vacant streets of Taipei is accompanied by the blaring sounds of sirens. It was recorded using the same stable camera work and singular perspective as The 561st Hour, which was filmed during the Wanan air raid drill, an annual defence exercise that began in 1978 when Taiwan was still under martial law. During the thirty-minute-long drills, citizens are directed to evacuate the streets and seek shelter. These preparatory measures simultaneously perpetuate anxieties concerning the territory’s unstable security and sovereignty and normalise them through routine and repetition. Indeed, the exhibition catalogue notes that the deserted urban landscapes have ‘become perfect backdrops for selfies’ and pranks, such as ‘an unexpected sighting of a dinosaur brazenly jaywalking’ during Wanan Air Raid Drill no.39 (p.20–21).³ Such events highlight the trivialisation of ‘wars in everyday life’ and ‘the everyday in war’, which is especially encouraged by the sensationalist lens of the media. 

Shown on the wall nearby, a small pencil drawing titled What Lies Beyond Us? FIG.4 expands the themes of catastrophe in daily life – as well as the power of images, media and modern technology – beyond the specificity of Taiwan. A group of men, all wearing safety goggles and facing the same direction, sit in four rows of reclining wooden chairs. Based on a black-and-white photograph of American senior military officials witnessing one of the Operation Greenhouse nuclear test explosions in 1951, the image obscures the object of their attention. Less a direct commentary on nuclear power, the drawing reveals Yuan’s interest in modern image circulation and its implications on our psyche and everyday realities. His meticulous process of recreating the photograph is augmented by his inclusion of the pixelation of the screen through which he likely copied it, honing his critique of the possible distortions that mediated images can engender. The artist also extends the work into the exhibition space by arranging a series of similar chairs in front of the central screen showing Everyday Maneuver and The 561st Hour. This tangible link between image and reality places visitors in a position of privilege and complicit spectatorship that mirrors that of the men in the photograph.

Speaking to the artist’s interest in the deceptive nature of images, What Lies Beyond Us? is Yuan’s second rendition of the same photograph. An almost identical drawing was displayed in Yuan’s 2018 solo exhibition Tomorrowland at TKG+, Taipei, which was an important impetus for the exhibition under review.⁴ Notably, the earlier drawing is a more straightforward replication of the photograph, devoid of the pixel-like marks that comprise the second version. The change in title – from What Lies Before Us? to What Lies Beyond Us? – engages with a more complex form of spectatorship, in which meaning is accrued and manipulated. The reclining chairs were also present in Tomorrowland, installed as part of the immersive installation Towards Light (2018), in which the artist posed the question: ‘if the image is light […] what would this image become when light is pushed to the extreme without carrying any image or symbol?’ (p.72).

In Everyday War the curator Abby Chen brings together the key elements of Yuan’s œuvre, synthesising, as she states, ‘the artist’s anxiety and hope, evoking the notion of home and search for “poetic dwelling”’ (p.10). Here, she references the writings of Martin Heidegger and his emphasis on the role of ‘being-in-the world’ and rootedness in relation to the concept of home. These ideas are particularly resonant in Yuan’s video installation Dwelling FIG.5, in which he reflects on Heidegger’s aspiration for people following the Second World War ‘to find an emotional and physical “homeplace”’ (p.38) in a contemporary context. A sofa, rug and a lamp are arranged in the exhibition space, creating a generic domestic setting. The large screen in front of the sofa displays a similar room, replete with bookcase, coffee table and rocking horse. The five-minute video begins with slow, almost imperceptible movements: air bubbles emerge and small objects, such as a newspaper, begin to fluctuate gently as though caught in a light breeze. The scene is then violently interrupted by an explosion. In slow motion, furniture is torn apart, debris fills the screen and book pages seem to float in mid-air, before the footage reverses and everything is rightfully put back in its place. Despite its monumental scale and exacting detail, this hypnotic tableau is in fact a miniaturised model installed – and destroyed – inside an aquarium, an uncanny simulation of a homeplace.

Similar themes of entrapment and the inability to escape from the normalised conditions of ‘everyday war’ are also apparent in the exhibition’s eponymous video FIG.6. The work capitalises on the destruction of Dwelling, expanding the choreographed violence to a life-size location. The camera pans in and out of a studio apartment cast in the glow of the afternoon sun. There is a bed in the corner with a world map hanging above it; a sofa faces the opposite direction, towards a laptop and a television screen that is animated by violent footage; a bowl of fruit sits on a coffee table; and a small fish tank perches on the top of a bookshelf. As in Dwelling, the viewer’s eye is initially caught by small movements: the sway of the curtains, the curling tendrils of a plant and the aimlessly swimming fish. Then, with the sounds of shattering glass and gunshots, explosions penetrate the window and set the furniture aflame. The parallels between the enclosed living space and the fish tank – one of the last things to explode in the room – is clear. As Yuan has noted about the Wanan Air Drills, ‘You can see young people taking selfies and cosplaying in the midst of the drill […] This feels like being a goldfish living in a safe, controlled environment of a fish tank’.⁵

As an apt response to the global estrangement that is alluded to in the title of the 60th International Art Exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere, the final room FIG.7 of Everyday War brings together two works that question our complacency towards the uncanny of contemporary war and violence.⁶ Prophecy (2014) comprises a rectangular dining table, laid with cutlery, filled wine glasses and candles. Installed in the corner of the dark room is Flat World (2024), a single-channel video that combines, in a hyper-lapse sequence, Google Street View images that have a consistent central perspective. The seemingly forward motion pieced together by surveillance images simultaneously stretches out and collapses the distance between the undifferentiated locations, which are familiar yet unidentifiable. At random intervals, impacts shake the dining table, causing the plates and cutlery to clatter but never fall. This jolts the viewer from a dazed observation of the successive views in Flat World, which emulate the unthinking way one encounters the world through relentless information channels.

The violent disruption of Prophecy is a warning that the normalised danger and chaos constantly broadcast in the media are perhaps less distant than they might seem from the comfort of ‘home’. Everyday War is a timely and resonant presentation of Yuan’s work, which tackles the anxieties of displacement, spectatorship and living in the aftermath of modernity, where technological advancements can foster violence and dissociation and encourage systems of surveillance. The ‘everyday war’ that Yuan presents is one that ‘transcends the conventional confines of artillery and military conflicts’ in our geopolitical world order (p.44).