An exhibition’s quietest artwork provides a key to one of its most important themes.
Film scholar Markus Nornes relates how even the seen-it-all audiences at the Ann Arbor film festival were awed by the work of Taiwan-based artist Yuan Goang-Ming.
Excerpted from a conversation with Tim Svenonius and Nick Stone.
About 20 years ago, I came across a photograph by Yuan Goang-Ming called City Disqualified. It was a large-scale photograph of the busiest street corner in Taiwan, but there were absolutely no people. I knew that street corner because I’d been to Taiwan, and I was puzzled: how could he take this photo in the middle of the day without people?
Later on, I found out that he took hundreds of photos from the same position. He selected the parts of the space that had no people, layered them, and collapsed them into a single image. I was astounded; I knew that it would take an enormous amount of very detailed, patient work.
That is one of the marks of all of Goang-Ming’s art: it’s precise and patient, with an astounding attention to detail you don’t often see, especially in installation art. It’s more like the work of a painter who is concerned with every brushstroke.
We had an exhibition in Ann Arbor that included three of his installations. He had devised his own software to have computers running the three projectors simultaneously so that they were synced perfectly and looping. That attention to detail was wonderful, and I saw a continuity there from the photography. It may look simple, but it’s not. It’s quite elaborate in its own way, it’s seamless, and it’s happening behind the scenes.
In a conventional Hollywood film, the placement and movements of the camera are linked to a certain character’s point of view, or to an all-seeing narrator. But in Goang-Ming’s case, the camera movement — and as a result, what we see — is linked to the lens axis: an imaginary, perfectly straight line extending out from the exact center of the camera lens. Goang-Ming locks his camera to this axis and he moves it back and forth with such precision, in ways that no one else in the world is doing. It’s either moving perfectly forward and backward, or it’s spinning in the most precise way.
This approach might feel cold and technical to the viewer, because it’s not linked to a human point of view. Is it the view of God? Is it possibly a form of moving image media that has absolutely no point of view built into it? I’m not sure, but it makes every spectator who encounters it think about it.
When you encounter a work by Goang-Ming, you can tell it’s his, if you know who he is; and if you don’t, it’s perplexing and wonderful.
It would be a mistake to see Yuan Goang-Ming as a political warrior or activist, but there’s no question that much of his work is socially engaged in its own particular way. It’s not apolitical, but it’s not political in a conventional or familiar sense. And that makes it interesting and powerful.
For all the elaborate, calculated technology behind his work, you can tell he cares about the world. He cares about people. Even when you don’t see any people in the work, you can tell; you can feel it. There’s something in his images that connects with you.
I think that’s why his program was incredibly well received at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, which is the premier experimental film festival, going back to the 1960s. It’s one of the oldest festivals in the world, so everyone’s seen everything. And yet, I talked to a number of people afterwards who said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that.’ Even at the festival where everybody has seen everything, audiences came out saying, “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
University of Michigan professor Markus Nornes is a scholar of Asian cinema, documentary filmmaker, and international film festival programmer. A professor of Asian Studies at the University of Michigan since 1996, Nornes specializes in the cinemas of Asia, particularly the non-fiction form; much of his work has explored the history of Japanese documentary and its theoretical implications, as well as nonfiction production in other parts of Asia. Nornes has also published widely on the topic of screen translation. His directing credits include the five-screen video installation The Player Played (2017); The Big House (2018), co-directed with Soda Kazuhiro, Terri Sarris, and students from the University of Michigan; and When We’re Together (2020), a documentary about the 2020 Michigan Primary.
Top image: Installation view of Everyday Maneuver (2018) at the Venice Biennale, 2024.
