Continuing to July 7, 2025
It’s strange that there have been relatively few exhibitions in Northern California registering the tsunami of daily turmoil that we see on cable news and social media. It is almost as if the art world is whistling past the ever-expanding graveyard of current events, hoping against hope that the world will somehow return to “normalcy” if we bide our time.
Yuan Goang-Ming’s exhibition, titled “Everyday War,” bucks such wishful thinking, and does so in ways that are simultaneously subtle, surprising, and sometimes shocking. The overall feeling of the exhibition is one of anxious calm prior to the onset of a terrifying storm. The exhibition was curated by Abby Chen, expanding on a similar show of Yuan’s work that she organized for the Taiwan Pavilion at last summer’s Venice Biennale.
Of the nine works Chen has selected, six are ultra-high-resolution video projections. Of these, five are single-channel displays with ominous soundtracks that subtly intrude on each other within the vast gallery space, intermingling into a haunting soundscape without distracting from each other. “Dwelling” is a 5-minute piece (2014) that firmly establishes the ominous tone. Yuan’s camera lingers over an uninhabited domestic interior, capturing clues indicating that whoever lived there had hastily departed minutes prior. Suddenly, glassware shatters and windows smash from the outside as small fires spontaneously combust. As with a similarly structured piece titled “Everyday War,” (2024, 5 min 56 seconds), the point is clear: to live in Taipei is to be aware of the looming possibility that hypersonic cruise missiles might suddenly appear from across the Strait of Taiwan.
In “Everyday Maneuver,” (2018, 5 Min) a mélange of arial drone footage visualizes depopulated streets in Taipei, normally full of congested traffic but here eerily empty. The scene is serenaded by blaring air raid sirens. The recorded scene was not an actual enemy attack; the Taiwan government holds regular civil defense exercises in preparation for the onset of sudden war, meaning that the streets of Taipei regularly empty out to create the chilling science fiction effect that we see in the video. No fictitious movie trope, this is real life.
Another kind of turmoil is examined in “The 561st Hour of Occupation” (2014, 5 min, 56 seconds). The camera slowly pans across a large room that turns out to be the legislative chamber of the Taiwan Parliament. Here, Yuan catches up with many student protestors who had occupied the chamber for over twenty days. The protest was later called “The Sunflower Movement,” motivated by objections to proposals for cross-strait trade agreements that would diminish Taiwan’s economic sovereignty. Gradually, the slow-moving camera stops at a makeshift shrine at the back of the room, only to reverse course by slowly pulling back to the Parliament chamber to complete a continuous loop. This piece builds on Michael Snow’s landmark structuralist film, “Wavelength” (1967). The more recent video adds grand political drama to Snow’s off-camera murder mystery.
Not all of Yuan’s works address the growing geopolitical anxieties of the past decade. The oldest work in the exhibition is the three-channel “Disappearing Landscape” (2011, 9 minutes and 14 seconds). It is situated in a room adjacent to the main gallery, allowing it to provide tranquil respite from the anxious pitch of impending doom in the main room. What we get is a meditative exploration of Yuan’s Taipei neighborhood, perfectly synched across three screens to highlight a long inhalation of urban solitude.
Less tranquil is the 10-minute single-channel piece, “Flat World” (2024), the most recent work here, where Yuan raids and reorganizes thousands of images from the Google Street View database. The result is a headlong rush across hundreds of different geographic locations, all captured as a seamless high-speed zoom. As the saying goes, no matter where you go, there you are, reminding viewers how far-flung locations are becoming increasingly homogeneous, enhanced and simulated as they are by technological artifice.
