Everyday War, Yuan Goang-Ming, The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
Everyday Maneuver, 2018, at the entrance to the show Everyday War
By: Hugh Leeman
Taiwanese artist Yuan Goang-Ming's major exhibition, Everyday War, at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, uses allegorical single-channel videos to place the viewer at the threshold of being overwhelmed by the immensity and dynamic complexity of Taiwan's socio-political existential threat, pitting history and ideology against one another over China's long proposed "reunification" with its "breakaway province."
Goang-Ming, the father of Taiwanese film art, subsumes the museum visitor within cinematographic symbolism to introduce a war waged on the ordinary Taiwanese citizen’s psyche, caught in a web of historical threads amidst decades of the daily threat of invasion from mainland China. To immerse the visitor in this reality, the artist includes domestic furniture that furthers his allegorical narrative and a single pencil drawing which offers insight into the very chairs which the viewer has used to view his emotionally charged videos.
Central to the historical conflict is the Chinese Civil War, which concluded in 1949 with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong, over the Nationalist Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek. Following the defeat, the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan. On the mainland, the Communist Party asserts authoritarian rule, while Taiwan has evolved into a democracy.
Everyday War, both the name of the solo exhibition and a single-channel video installation that premiered at the 2024 Venice Biennale, was curated by Abby Chen, the Contemporary Art Curator at the Asian Art Museum. Chen brought Everyday War and additional videos, spanning a decade of the artist's career, to San Francisco amidst the ever-evolving potential of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Before entering the exhibit, the viewer encounters a single vertical banner bearing the show and artist's names in both English and Chinese, hanging at head height. The vertical banner takes on a tone of significance relating to the modern history of vertical banners used in pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong to protest mainland China's Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 and, more recently, in 2014, Hong Kong protesters unfurled a massive vertical banner stating, "Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow Taiwan." The latter banner, connecting Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement and Taiwan's Sunflower Movement, both of which protested Chinese influence on their democracies.
As the viewer ducks under or walks around the title banner, a dimly lit room is entered with the exhibit's only wall text, once again vertical, first in English and then in Chinese. The wall text in the vertical banner style begins with a tone that reads like a defiant poet's staccato: "sirens, explosive blasts, sudden pounding, a slow tempo anthem, and a child's babbling." It ends its first paragraph posing questions to the visitor: "Is this a site of allegory reflecting the past and present? Or a prophecy of the human future told through an exhibition? To Yuan Goang-Ming, a second-generation war refugee born, raised, and living with his family in Taiwan, it's likely both."
Moving past the entry vestibule's wall text, one enters a sprawling exhibition space of darkness lit only by the brilliant glow of the artist's videos. The first screen, some 12 feet tall by 15 feet wide, is from the artist's 2018 single-channel video with sound, Everyday Maneuver. The video shown on both sides of the large screen pulls the viewer into a disconcerting reality.
Once on the far side of the screen, viewers can sit in slightly reclined white beach chairs to watch the 5:57-minute video. Beyond the vastness of the image and the drama of flying above a bridge towards a metropolis, the intensity is heightened by an air raid siren.
The visuals transform just before the bridge ends, with the new perspective boxing in the viewer between the city's skyscrapers. While looking down from above, not a soul is in sight at the height of the day as the siren wails. The camera pans past a plaza and towards Taipei's central subway station, which doubles as a bomb shelter for Taipei residents. The sirens, the empty streets, and the station are a testament to the reality of Taipei's transformation into a ghost town during the Wanan air raid drills held annually since 1978. Each drill lasting 30 minutes readies residents to shelter in place in the event of an invasion from mainland China.
Importantly, the significance of the chairs the viewer sits in is revealed through the artist's nearby pencil drawing, What Lies Beyond Us? (2024). The chairs are just like the ones observers sat in to witness the development of nuclear bombs tested on April 18, 1951, on Parry Island of the Marshall Islands in the West Pacific. In the realistic drawing, just as at the actual event in 1951, the viewer sees the now-familiar white beach chairs filled with civilian and military brass, wearing specially designed protective goggles, turning the world-changing moment into a spectator-like event.
Everyday Maneuver at the show Everyday War
After the unsettling aerial fly-through of Taipei, the air raid sirens come to an end as the screen fades to black. The journey through Taiwanese citizens' reality, backdropped by the threat of war seen on the exhibition's largest screen, is not yet finished. Comfortably seated as modern spectators on the beach furniture, the next video comes into focus.
Video Still, The 561st Hour of Occupation, 2014
The same screen's second video, The 561st Hour of Occupation, 5:56 minutes, (2014), takes us inside the internal conflict of Taiwan's Sunflower Movement, a rebellious protest within the democratic chamber of Taiwan. The video's opening view emerges inside the legislative building in March of 2014 when students protested Taiwan's free trade agreement with China, the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement, seeing it as a threat to democracy and Taiwanese businesses.
The camera pans in on unfurled vertical banners hanging from above the parliament floor as youth occupy the space, displacing the politicians from discussing the trade agreement for 23 days, ultimately preventing the agreement's ratification. The scene transforms from a peaceful protest filled with dozens of youth into a vacant parliament that looks as if a rowdy fraternity party got out of hand. What remains are the strewn-about banners in Chinese and "Free Taiwan" signs in English, as well as numerous tripod-supported cameras of the press.
Taiwan's peaceful Sunflower Movement stands in stark contrast to those in 1989 when hundreds, if not thousands, of student protesters were killed in China's Tiananmen Square Massacre. The discrepancy in the death toll largely depends on who you ask and where they are from. A fact that is underscored by Goang-Ming's video, slowly panning across dozens of press cameras and their tripods focused on the parliament floor. The imagery is testament to one of the great ideological divides between Taiwan and China. In China, access to information and freedom of the press are deeply restricted, whereas in Taiwan, the press's cameras and their freedom to report to the people highlight the profound ideological distance between the opposing shores of the Taiwan Strait.
Beyond the videos, the museum visitor comes to a table set comfortably with a white tablecloth, crystal wine glasses holding healthy splashes of white wine, and full water glasses awaiting dinner guests. The optimistic scene is shattered, and the viewer is shocked to their senses as hidden haptic sensors intermittently rattle the table, as if a bomb has dropped in the distance, its reverberations have shaken the hopeful scene to the darkest potential lingering in the back of Taiwan's mind. The table's invited guests will never come. The table and the domesticity of the installation prepare the viewer for the headline video, Everyday War (2024), 10:33 minutes.
For museum visitors witnessing Everyday War, the artist has exchanged the reclined beach chairs for couches with a side table topped by a dimly lit lamp, seemingly straight out of a Dwell magazine domestic fantasy. Sitting comfortably on the household furniture, facing an oversized screen that loops the artist's single-channel video, a camera pans in on an apartment scene, then back out, over and again, always in slow motion.
Everyday War, video still, 2024, 10:33 minutes for the show Everyday War at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
The video opens from the far side of the working-class Taiwanese apartment furnished with a couch, kitchenette, coffee table, bed, bookshelves, and a modest flat-screen television. Tranquility, intimacy, and symbolism create an uncomfortable peacefulness that the viewer knows is about to end. The artist heightens the intimacy by creating the entire scene within his own house. What's about to happen gives a glimpse into the foundational fears of the nation's nightmare, seemingly creeping towards a reality.
The immediate symbolism of a Chinese language newspaper on the coffee table while an English language newspaper sits on the bed is clearly the home of a person with their feet in disparate realities.
A coffee mug, filled nearly to the brim, sits beside a MacBook laptop, actively displaying a multicolored screensaver. Just beyond the MacBook, true to 21st-century form, yet another screen showing a first-person video game, with a soldier running through an urban setting and shooting at houses. No one is guiding the video game soldier. This screen within the screen asks the viewer what our role may be as the onlooker in a world inundated with the perverse entertainment of warfare.
The video slowly pans in towards goldfish in a tank, then the first bullet pierces through the tranquility, shattering the window behind the TV screen with the video game. The first bullet is followed by several more, destroying the coffee maker, which vomits up water. The lamp above the couch is hit, and its glass comes raining down. Distracted by the bullets, the camera has now fully zoomed in on the goldfish calmly swimming in their watery world, unaware of the chaos.
The camera begins to pan out from the fish. More bullets ring across the room, shattering dishes, a Coke can, and all manner of domestic appliances that once hit by bullets dance through a slow-motion state of destruction before collapsing to the floor. The camera pans in towards the fish again. Are the fish an allegory of the privilege to be unaware, or is there simply nothing they can do?The camera pauses at the back of the room.
Once again, in slow motion, it pans back in, and flames skim books on the shelf beneath the fish. As the camera zooms in for a close-up of the fish and their tank, an even greater eruption causes the books to be engulfed in flames, thrusting the paperback Art and Power from the shelf. Its information collapses to the floor beside leaves from a plant that once sat on the window ledge.
The camera pans out one last time; at the back of the room, pink and white flowers are overwhelmed by bullets shot through the apartment's window and walls. Still, the goldfish swim in a tank isolated within their artificial reality. A bullet hits a cushion, and its feathers flutter like oversized snowflakes. The book 1949 precariously teeters on the shelf, its title marks the end of China's Civil War. Albert Camus' The Rebel explodes off the shelf in flames, its cover fully facing the viewer in slow motion. Camus published the book just two years after China's civil war. In it, he critiqued Soviet communism and revolutionary ideologies that justify violence and oppression in the name of history.
The most striking part of the Everyday War is the video game never stops amidst the frenzy of bullets and an accompanying audio clip, presumably from one video game player to another: a man with an American accent recounting a youthful story says in part, "We had airsoft guns, and we would shoot canoes next to the Boy Scouts… We took it seriously. We wore ghillie suits. We would wear camouflage throughout the night, dude, it was a special operations mission for us."
Suddenly, it seems the intended audience was always the United States, entertained by war, and long protected by oceans of security like the fish from the bullet-riddled frenzy. A map once untouched above the bed is now singed from the explosions; the West Coast of America and Taiwan get the worst of it.
Finally, though it's the fish's turn, the tank is hit, creating a waterfall that rushes over the bookshelf. Slowly, its emptying cascade becomes a mere drip; the camera focuses on the fish tank's shards of glass suspended in time, now empty, the tension released, everything is still.
The video returns to the peaceful domesticity where it began, just a day in the life of an everyday war.
Yuan Goang-Ming doesn't decorate homes and museums with the subjective nature of beauty or send viewers home with a happy Hollywood ending. Instead, he is giving us what great art offers: ideas that challenge our understanding of history, ideology, and the world as a whole. In this world, all things are up in the air, fluttering like the feathers of the shot-up couch cushions, from America's global influence to the mental health of those who live through the menace of invasion, and most especially Taiwan's autonomy.
