Yuan Goang Ming’s video exhibit at the Asian Art Museum reads like a movie theater with 5 films going at once. Shrouded otherwise in the darkness of a cement room painted dark brown-grey, there permeates something distinctly surreal. One pads softly around the room so as not to disturb the realm of another’s subconscious that you’ve entered. The fragmented plotlines within it feel familiar, as the artist shows us his daily life, caring for his family, next to his inner world, his worries, fears, and anxieties, and the realities of life in Taiwan. . There are five films, a sculpture, and an illustration, as well as a spread of lawn chairs and a couple of couches to view the films from. The content of the films spans a range of ideas, from real domestic footage spliced with pans of a twilight scene on a man made canal, to a 2014 student lead occupation of a federal building, doors blocked with slipshod piles of chairs tied with ropes and embellished with handmade political posters. The crown jewel of the show, which served to advertise the exhibit on SF bus stops, is footage of a detonation of an actual bomb in the artists living room. One pauses to wonder, how did he convince his wife to let him to this?

Taiwan’s historical relationship with China is a complex one. Decades of occupation by Japan and the retreat of splitting Chinese factions to Taiwan during the communist revolution have diluted the the memory of who the land belongs to. The osmotic movement of Chinese and Taiwanese citizens over the strait have led China to assert that Taiwan is within its jurisdiction. Taiwan says it was never a part of China, and its current democratically elected leadership openly declares the country sovereign. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has threatened war by 2027 if an agreement isn’t met, and both countries state they are seeking peaceful resolution to this unresolved issue that is now over a century old. China has said in no uncertain terms that any intervention by any countries in the conflict will be handled swiftly and remorselessly. As of right now, Taiwan is recognized by 12 countries as sovereign. Meanwhile, the country practices city wide air raid drills once a year. At the sound of a siren, the streets are emptied for hours while citizens shelter in place. A drone video of this also features in the show, wherein a camera pans slowly over the massive skyscrapers and multi lane streets, without so much as a bird or squirrel visible.

The looming threat of war seems to be the impetus for this exhibit, but the artist strikes a balance between depicting the tangible qualities of implied rule by a foreign government, themes of time and its inevitable passage, familial life, and citizen revolt. The artist blends the peace of his existence with the existential realities of being Taiwanese.

The exhibit ultimately illustrates the demands of living in a world post atomic bomb, as countries compete for world domination and ignore the will of sovereign lands in efforts to out-resources one another in a merciless plundering of earth’s resources, no matter the human cost.

A poster for Yuan Goang Mings exhibit at the Asian Art Museum at a bus stop in San Francisco

A wikimedia commons picture of the student occupation of a government building in 2014