“Everyday War”, Taiwan’s collateral event for the 60th Venice Biennale at at the Palazzo delle Prigioni presented by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, is a solo exhibition by pioneering Taiwanese video artist Yuan Goang-Ming, curated by Chinese-American curator Abby Chen. The show features old and new video works specially created for the Biennale, as well as a kinetic installation and sketches.
Responding to the 60th Venice Biennale‘s curatorial theme, “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere”, “Everyday War” addresses the doubts, the hidden chaos and the inherent state of loss concealed behind the beauty of our world, as well as the feeling of constant displacement humanity feels in the face of an ever changing natural, socio-political and cultural landscape. Yuan Goang-Ming’s works on show contemplate potential conflicts in daily life and explore states of existence and unease in contemporary society.
The exhibition venue is setup with its different spaces resembling domestic settings, like a sun deck with wooden sun chairs to lounge on, a living room with sofa and floor lamp, and a dining room with a table set for dinner complete with real glasses and porcelain plates. The home setting reflects the artist’s interest in concepts of home, living and the uncanny tomorrow, and aims to awaken emotions in the viewer, evoking anxiety and fear of losing one’s dwelling and sense of belonging. The artist’s work questions the stability of one’s life, in the present context of constant crises in the political, social and cultural spheres as well as the impact of climate change. By juxtaposing a calm and poetic gaze with fear and anxiety, Yuan Goang-Ming points to the impermanence that governs life in our era.
The artist, as quoted in the press release, explains that “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 domestic scenes – all of these attempts (sic) to express the anxieties and unease of the complex world we live in.” Curator Abby Chen further emphasizes that “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.”
Upon entering the exhibition space, the large room is set up like a film screening in a garden. On the big screen, two works alternate seamlessly, addressing socio-political issues. In Everyday Maneuver, five drones simultaneously fly directly above the five main roads of Taipei City. Through surveillance cameras, the drones record the “Wanan Air Defence Drill” — a series of annual air defence drills conducted in Taiwan since 1978, even after the lifting of martial law in 1987. The city in the video is completely empty, and stands as a metaphor for geopolitical instability and threats.
The second work, The 561st Hour of Occupation, was filmed in response to an invitation from students to document the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement in Taiwan. Students occupied the Legislative Yuan for nearly a month, protesting for a better future for their homeland by politically representing themselves. Here, the artist reverses and slows down the national anthem, using it as a soundtrack, and presenting an atmosphere of “sacrifice” and “sacredness”.
As we continue through the exhibition space, we encounter the more domestic, intimate scenes of works like Dwelling, Everyday War and Prophecy.
ASIA spoke with Yuan Goang-Ming at Palazzo delle Prigioni during the opening of the 60th Venice Biennale to find out more about his work and the exhibition.
Hello and congratulations on your exhibition here in Venice. I am honoured to be able to have this special conversation with you about your exhibition. Could you tell me about the choice of the title “Everyday War” that ties all the works together in the show?
Thank you. I had this title in mind back in 2019, so this exhibition had been in preparation for four and a half years, and by coincidence it fit into the topic of the Venice Biennale this year, “Foreigners Everywhere”. When I talk about ‘everyday war’, I want to talk about life during the war, but also the war that we encounter in our lives every single day. War is not just about the physical gunfire, but also about, for example, the unequal distribution of capitalism, natural disasters, climate change, the pandemic … and everything that we encounter every day. So in some way we are already in a state of war every single day.
A very basic question: why did you choose video as your main means of expression? What makes it for you the best medium to materialise your ideas?
Most of my works are video works, but I also have other forms of art, for example, in this exhibition I’ve shown a kinetic installation, and I also do some installations with light, although most of my works are video works… Why? I was a fine art student in college, when in the second year during my studies, I shifted my practice from traditional art to video art, because at that time I thought video, the moving image, had more possibilities to make more experiments, more than in traditional art. Because video is a time based art (form), so time is the biggest difference between traditional art and video art… that’s why I chose video as my main “tool” to create my works.
Your works (almost) always include a time of complete, serene calm and tranquillity. Then suddenly, things start to change radically and that quiet soon becomes chaos. Things start being destroyed by unknown, invisible forces, in a nightmarish scene. Could you speak to this dynamic in your work, and what you are talking about when you are shifting between these two extremes?
Every time when I feel I am happy, for example with family, at the same time I have got anxiety, an uncanny feeling that the happiness is going down or is going to disappear. Of course this is the strategy of my work, so I just want to contrast the two different kinds of state, the different situations, in order to contrast the feelings. Also, if you are feeling this is a very calm scene, you are feeling very relaxed, but then an extreme explosion comes up, and you would then get a shock. For me, sometimes our reality is like this. For example, in Taiwan, we have a lot of earthquakes, typhoons, so it’s about the everpresent anxiety and that uncanny feeling.
And it’s also about everything being temporary, ephemeral, and that can change all of a sudden…
Yes, that’s correct.
The works Everyday War and Dwelling are both located in very intimate, domestic settings that are all relatable to everyone. It’s home, it’s a safe space, it’s serene… Could you tell me more about why you choose to destroy such intimate spaces?
As I said, I would like to make the contrast. Dwelling is a miniature, and I put the miniature in a water tank. For Dwelling and Everyday War the setting is middle-class Ikea-style, so it means it’s just a very normal, common living space. The reason why I put the living room in a water tank is because I think the safest of places is in the mother’s womb, with the amniotic liquid. Dwelling is a seamless loop video, there’s no beginning and no end, so the explosion is destruction but also means rebirth. That means that maybe the explosion happened like in a dream, or maybe it is very real but also dreamlike. I want to blur the boundaries between reality and dream, creating a very oniric environment.
The other work, Everyday war, is a real scene, it’s a one-by-one life-size, different from the Dwelling miniature. Here I set a scene like that of a middle-class, single male’s living room. It’s a very absurd scene, because these kind of explosions normally do not happen in a room like this, so that creates a kind of absurdity. In the video, on the right hand side there is a TV screen, which shows a YouTuber live streaming himself playing in an online war game, and at the same time what the YouTuber is saying actually corresponds to what is happening in the room, so people may wonder whether this is actually happening or we are actually in a game. But of course I hope that none of the works will become reality!
Please indulge my curiosity… what do you use to make things blow up in that work?
It is illegal! In Taiwan we have fireworks for new year and we are allowed to use them then. So I just use those small fireworks and collect all the gunpowder in them and aggregate that together to create the small explosions… We use an air compressor behind the books, for example, so they look like they blow up. We also use marbles to make them look and sound like bullets and gunfire.
I also spent a lot of time to modify all these tools and machines in order to make the scene as realistic as possible. The fire that you see is the one often used in concerts, so those are concert effects that you see there. The whole scene is done in real time, without editing and post-production. It took four years for the work!
I’m interested to know a bit more from you about the works shown together, Flat World and Prophecy. First of all, is there a special connection between the two as they are shown side by side? Could you tell me what the video signifies? The curator said it is a kind of new road movie…
The two works are not directly related to each other, but I wanted to create a very domestic environment. In the dining room, there usually is a TV and often people watch it while they are eating there. We call the video a kind of new road movie because there is an old movie genre called road movie, when people carried their camera and travelled the roads and captured them. The images and scenes you see in the work are actually not from camera, but are captured and collected from Google Street views.
So the views, the locations are curated… meaning, you chose them to look similar, in order for the video to seem like an endless, seamless road trip?
Yes, it’s a trip around the world. We start with cities and coastal areas to rural areas in Taiwan. Then I started to find different places around the world that resemble the views we see in Taiwan. Even though they look similar, they come from different parts of the world, from cities, coastal areas and rural areas.
There are some interesting aspects to this work, first of all the map, because behind it, there are (different kinds of) power, including military, economic, socio-political power and so on… But in our times, the digital map includes even more… for example, you will find that in many countries there is no Google Street view. Google Street View is not available everywhere, obviously, for instance in some countries in the Global South, or countries in Communist regimes, or in war zone countries. So you know that even though this is a digital service, it doesn’t cover everywhere. And there is always a reason behind what is available or not. The work therefore is concerned also with issues of freedom, political and economic power forces, etc.
As for the table installation Prophecy, could you tell me a bit more about the concept behind it?
It is a kinetic installation. I set a machine under the table, with something like a hammer under it that hits the table at random. There is actually no specific, precise or particular meaning to it, but I think that piece reminds people of different things. Some people, for example, will be reminded of someone banging on the table in anger while they are having dinner, or when having dinner suddenly an earthquake hits. Everyone based on their own life experiences can come up with their personal meaning for it. When one bangs on the table, for example, it might mean that people have different opinions, so I am also trying to talk about those differences in perspectives.
Finally… How is it to be part of the Venice Biennale? Do you have any thoughts about presenting your work in an old prison?
So tired! I have no idea now, I just feel tired, but happy, happy I finished the exhibition. In reality, presenting these works in an old prison and how to present it, the layout… most of the ideas come from the curator, and I agreed with that and how to create an environment in contrast and synergy with the location. I just focused on each work, while for the whole space it was the curator that thought about the layout.
So in relation to ‘prison’, to all the concepts we have talked about and what the curator also said about the ability to create and show art with full freedom of expression in what was once a space of suppression… a final question: what is freedom for you?
How to answer this… this is a hard questions to answer, because there are so many aspects to the concept of ‘freedom’. Taiwan is a very free country, so when I live in Taiwan I actually take freedom for granted, I always feel very free. Yesterday when I returned here to see the exhibition I did realise that if Taiwan was not a free country, many of these works wouldn’t have been able to be shown here, and I would not have been able to create these works, so those are the things that actually remind me that… yes, Taiwan is a very free country and society, and as a matter of fact, Taiwan is ranked as one of the most free countries in Asia. So that contributes to how I can make these works without many concerns or constraints.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
The Collateral Event of the 60th Venice Biennale “Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War” is on view at Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice, from 20 April to 24 November 2024.