Looming Threat Informs Taiwanese Artist’s ‘Everyday War’ at Asian Art Museum

In Taiwan, the threat of invasion by China is ever present — maybe it will happen tomorrow, maybe next year, maybe never. Video artist Yuan Goang-Ming captures in his work this feeling of dread that pervades even the mundaneness of routine activities.

In “Everyday War,” an exhibit at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum through Aug. 4, Yuan explores the unsettled and anxious nature of daily life in which violence feels close and security out of reach in more and more parts of the world.

Considered the father of video art in Taiwan, Yuan represented his country at last year’s 60th Venice Biennale with “Everyday War.” Abby Chen, the contemporary curator at the Asian Art Museum, curated it for Taiwan’s pavilion at the international festival of art and culture before bringing it to San Francisco this year.

For the Taiwan pavilion at the Biennale, the artist was asked to choose a curator. Yuan was given a list of mostly young academic curators active in Europe. But he wanted to work with someone who understood Taiwan and its “nuanced position in both global politics and the art world,” and he thought of Chen, he explained in an email. His wife settled the choice when she did some research and found a talk in which Chen described how, in the narrative around Chinese contemporary art, artists from Taiwan and Hong Kong are always on the periphery. That signaled to Yuan that their experiences aligned: “In a Eurocentric art world, Asia is already peripheral — and Taiwan is the periphery of that periphery,” he wrote.

Yuan added that he was honored to have his first major solo exhibit in the United States at the Asian Art Museum.

“I really love San Francisco — it offers something rare to find elsewhere: a rich artistic atmosphere combined with a spirit of technological innovation,” he wrote. “This city carries a layered history of migration, social movements, and questions of identity.”

Chen was familiar with Yuan’s work and had featured it previously. She said she was deeply moved when she saw Yuan’s “The 561st Hour of Occupation” at Japan’s Mori Museum in 2020 and found herself crying as she repeatedly watched the video paying homage to the students taking over the Taiwanese parliament in 2014. When Chen organized “After Hope: Videos of Resistance” at the Asian Art Museum from 2021 to 2022, she included that video.

Two videos in Yuan’s Asian Art Museum exhibit depict explosions of domestic spaces. In “Dwelling,” a living room with a couch, lamp, chairs and coffee table with a teapot on top detonates and is then put back together, and in “Everyday War” — the exhibit’s titular piece — there’s an explosion in what looks like a studio apartment. Other installations include “Everyday Maneuver,” which shows the streets of Taiwan eerily empty in the middle of the day during the annual air raid drill, and “Prophecy,” in which a table set with nice dishes, wine glasses and silverware, jumps periodically, rattling the table settings and adding to the feeling of unease.

The Venice show was situated in the Palazzo Priccioni, a space that once served as a prison, and it was praised by both audience members and critics, ending up on many “best of” lists. In an email, Yuan wrote that he saw people cry at the show and hug strangers.

In a conversation at the Asian Art Museum, Chen said many people in San Francisco told her they didn’t want to see the show, fearing it would depress them. But afterward, they told her they left feeling energized and hopeful.

Chen said she thinks it’s because of what she calls the poetry of the work, and how it makes people feel heard and understood when their vague dread and worry is articulated. The show is therapeutic, she said, because it takes the viewer’s anxiety, anger and sadness, and provides a place to reflect on those emotions.

“You don’t know how to treat it,” Chen said. “But he dissolves it right in front of you. So, in a way it magnifies this fear, but at the same time with his explosion, he helps you dissolve it.”

Artist Summer Lee, a friend of Chen’s, went to Venice and participated in a talk with Chen and Yuan at the show in San Francisco. She said she was glad the artist chose Chen, and that Chen had gotten acclaim for the show, which Lee called extremely relevant.

“The core of his work is saying is that we are in an everyday war that isn’t about tanks and artillery,” Lee said. “With all these Trump cuts, we’re in this invisible war of funding and our rights being taken away, and there’s climate change and so many things that are very menacing.”

Lee agreed with Chen’s description of the poetry of Yuan’s videos giving viewers a way to connect, and that through art we can, in a way, practice our response to scary things.

“Art is mimesis. You need the distance between the real and the art,” she said. “We’re being confronted by so much uncertainty, and you need to do that in the swimming pool of life before you go out to the ocean.”