Videos at Asian Art Museum Capture the Anxiety and Explosions of ‘Everyday War’

Standing in Yuan Goang-Ming’s Everyday War at the Asian Art Museum, I was periodically startled by a loud “BANG!”

The sound emanated from the dinner table in the center of the gallery, a sculptural installation titled Prophecy, featuring a refined setting of white porcelain dishes, sparkling silverware and wine glasses holding modest pours of rosé, all periodically clattering. I felt my mouth go dry, my blood pressure rise, my palms sweat. But I was already on edge.

The mood of Everyday War is unsettling. In addition to Prophecy and one small graphite drawing, the show consists of several large-scale videos playing simultaneously throughout the gallery. From low frequency synth pads to the sounds of explosions, gunshots and sirens, the whole space hums with a discordant thrum.

BANG!

Organized by Abby Chen, curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum, and originally shown by Taiwan at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Everyday War features six of Yuan’s video works from 2011 to 2024. The San Francisco re-hang is the artist’s first North American solo show. While the Venice version was presented in an ancient military fort, the more cacophonous installation at the Asian Art Museum trades claustrophobia for discord, infusing the viewing experience with a different kind of thematically appropriate paranoia.

Two of the videos show domestic spaces ravaged by prolonged explosions. In Dwelling (2014), a miniature living room, arranged underwater, is detonated, blowing apart in slow motion before the video is reversed and everything is sucked back into a whole.

In the exhibition’s titular video, from 2024, the artist created a full-scale set of a small apartment inside his own home, different parts of which burst into flame or are riddled by gunfire as a crane shot slowly pans over the room. At one point in the video, we end up underwater, too, the close zoom ending almost inside the fish tank on the bookshelf. We are transposed, briefly, into another, more peaceful world — but only after the tank itself has been shattered by a stray bullet. The soundtrack of the piece is the static banter and background noise of a livestream: someone playing a first-person shooter game. Devastation for some is child’s play for others.

In Everyday Maneuver (2018), a drone camera pans through the streets of Taipei. It’s midday and the city is completely empty. All the infrastructure remains, digital billboards playing their programmed ads, neon signs flashing on and off. A lone bird swoops through the frame. The footage was filmed during the Wanan Air Raid Drill, an annual exercise since 1978 practicing civilian response to an assault from mainland China. The angle and smoothness of these shots adds to their uncanny nature, which brings to mind the banality of surveillance states and the increasing insidiousness of drone warfare.

BANG!

Taiwan exists in a state of political limbo. Since the bifurcation of the Chinese government in 1949, Taiwan has been a self-governing democracy, though China still claims it as its own. The current Chinese president Xi Jinping has threatened reunification by military force, if necessary. As recently as June 5, he warned the United States to handle the Taiwan issue carefully.

The U.S. benefits from strategic ambiguity in its relationship with Taiwan. The U.S. has approved billions of dollars in weapons sales to the island, as well as millions of dollars in military aid. In 2022, China responded to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan by enacting live-fire military drills around the island.

One needn’t be in direct proximity to active military bombardment in order to feel the pressures of war, violence and state supremacy, though. Just think of the way the Israeli bombardment of Gaza has become a global cause or, domestically, recent attacks on immigrant communities and ICE protesters. The broader struggles of existing in late-stage capitalism have become daily exercises in survival.

What Everyday War illustrates best is this ambient nature of violence in contemporary society, violence that occasionally surfaces in sudden and explosive eruptions. It is the threat of those eruptions that produces the familiar condition of anxiety permeating the exhibition.

In the earliest work in the show, Disappearing Landscape – Passing II (2011), the camera flies through the artist’s home, showing scenes of domestic bliss before eventually roving underneath the building, panning across the murky, roiling water in the aqueducts below the city’s infrastructure. The footage of these dark waters parallels the suppressed nature of violence and our awareness of it — war as the unconscious of everyday life.

BANG!

‘Everyday War’ is on view at the Asian Art Museum (200 Larkin St., San Francisco) through Aug. 4, 2025.