NATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND IMAGES

Landscape of EnergyYUAN Goang-Ming2014

Landscape of Energy

Beginning in a forest at night, Landscape of Energy employs “scanning,” gliding linearly into a group of abandoned residential properties in Taichung, an Orchid Island elementary school, the ocean, a nuclear waste storage facility, the crowded South Bay of Pingtung which neighbors a nuclear power plant, the simulated control room inside the nuclear power plant, and Encore Garden, the so-called largest amusement park then in Asia. The camera returns to the deserted residential properties, panning over forsaken homes and unexpectedly comes upon an expanse of water, while Tokyo Bay gradually appears and disappears in the distance. Although the video documents the reality before our eyes, it exudes a cold sense of desolation that forebodes — like in a dream — the ruins of tomorrow. On March 11, 2011, when the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant’s radiation leak took place, the brother-in-law of my Japanese wife was stranded, and the news left my family extremely anxious: Suddenly, nuclear power became a real issue in our home. After some research, I realized that the closest power plant from my residence is only 19 kilometers away, while the Presidential Office Building is a mere 30 kilometers away from its closest power plant. The whole island and its power plants are enveloped in an alarming uncanniness. Landscape of Energy continues my exploration of concepts such as “ruins,” “home,” and “dwelling” with a documentary approach, reflecting the unpoetic dwellings of today’s world — or more specifically, Taiwan. Although Heidegger’s words of “poetic dwelling” — an ideal of being at peace with the sky, earth, divinities, and mortals — still ring in our ears, one cannot seem to achieve this state. The imagery pans in smooth, linear motion, in a gaze of surveillance; reality is tamed and contained in our eyes. And yet this is just an illusion of privilege, with the viewer glimpsing a restricted area of power, an area that is “restricted”1due to its connection to national security and the power of the state apparatus. As the camera slips in from above and surveys the space, it creates a surreal spectacle. A spectacle established within the crevice among the discernible, indiscernible, and disappearing. 1. Reference from “…Unpoetically We Dwell…—Yuan Goang-Ming ‘An Uncanny Tomorrow’ Solo Exhibition” by Chia Chi Jason WANG.Courtesy of the artist

Landscape of Energy - PauseYUAN Goang-Ming2014

Landscape of Energy - Pause

This is not a work of photography we normally recognize. To produce an image devoid of human traces, about a hundred photos are taken at the same site at different times. The humanless place occupied with parasols, beach chairs, backpacks, and flip flops is produced by mapping and collaging. A touristy beach where tourists disappeared with no explanation, two grand nuclear power plants standing close by in the distance, the image absurdly presents a giant theater of no humans. It should be a joyful scene, but emanating a sense of hidden uncanniness.This work reflects humanity’s irreversible pursuit of technology and the difficult state of survival where we co-exist harmoniously with nature in today’s world. Courtesy of the Tina Keng Gallery

The StrangersYUAN Goang-Ming2018

The Strangers

On weekends or holidays, the Zhongli train station in Taiwan is always filled with migrant workers. The voices and odors in the station almost trick someone into thinking they’re in another train station in some Southeastern Asian country. The total population of migrant workers in Taiwan has exceeded that of Taiwanese aborigines. They migrate for better economic or living conditions, a not-so-uncommon phenomenon that can be found throughout history. Today the world sees a surging wave of war refugees, from Afghanistan, Somalia, to Libya, from Myanmar's Rohingya people to five million refugees of Syria. If we think about the millions of Mainlander troops and civilians who retreated to Taiwan after the Kuomintang lost the 1949 Chinese Civil War, these immigrants, my father included, are regarded as “displaced persons” under the category of sociology. And my father would be considered a refugee during the Chinese Civil War, a stranger away from home. For The Strangers, I use a high-speed camera and a high-lumen spotlight to shoot from the passenger car through the window. As the train approaches the platform, I turn on the spotlight, and the high-speed camera begins filming the passengers waiting on the platform at a speed of 1,200 frames per second. The eight seconds of filming become eight minutes when played at a normal speed. As the camera captures each foreign face in high speed, these strangers turn into sculptures, frozen in time, on a platform that morphs into a spotlighted stage where one by one they appear to be in a somber portrait that looks us in the face.Courtesy of the artist

Self-imaging DeviceTAO Ya-Lun2013

Self-imaging Device

Self-imaging Deviceinvites audiences to walk close to a box-like space reminiscent of a vintage camera. Images of their faces will be refracted through the lens and projected onto the external wall. The visage is a self-image which audiences cannot directly see. Once they attempt to walk out of the devise to observe their own image, it disappears into thin air. Everything inside the box is a reflection, and the image is projected onto the outside world. The lens concentrates the reflected light in the light-collecting box and allows a ‘real’ image to form on the wall. The self-image, through reflection of light, appears in an elusive, subtle way in the space, slightly out of focus and incomplete, eliciting existential contemplation posited between real and unreal images. The work reveals the fact that the formation of one’s self-image is the projection and reflection of the inner, subjective world and simply an ephemeral “illusion” that does not last. Collection of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts

Aura Suddenly AppearingTAO Ya-Lun2013

Aura Suddenly Appearing

Psychologists compare the working of human consciousness to a projector — we project our self-consciousness onto the screen of what we consider to be the external world; meanwhile, all our thoughts, emotions and sensory perception are shown on the screen of the inner world through the reflection enabled by the external world.As the aura appears suddenly, is it an “appearance” or an “illusion” that we see? Through the disappearance or disintegration of the self and the “subject,” everything in this world, including oneself, can “appear” naturally. Using projection light, the installation projects light onto an object directly. As light bounces and reflects from the object, refracting and concentrating through the lens, the image of the object appears in the space. This sculptural, screen-like installation looks empty from a distance, but when audiences come closer, images of their bodies then implicitly show up on the wall surface. The artist makes use of transient and changing interplay of light and shadow to consistently suspend the subjective and cognitive systems, offering audiences an opportunity to reflect on their self-consciousness through interacting with the work to contemplate on the emptiness of simulacra. The work enables audiences to reconstruct bodily experience and to perceive the moment of an awakening consciousness, through which one re- evaluates the relationship between oneself and the external environment.Collection of the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (contribution by the artist)

Drones, Frosted Bats and the Testimony of the DeceasedHSU Chia-Wei2017

Drones, Frosted Bats and the Testimony of the Deceased

Drones, Frosted Bats and the Testimony of the Deceasedis filmed at the abandoned site of Hsinchu Branch of the Sixth Japanese Naval Fuel Plant. During World War II, the fuel plant was used to produce aviation fuel with butyl alcohol developed by the Department of Industrial Fermentation at the Industrial Research Institute. As a victim of the war, the deserted buildings reveal the stories of the past with the bullet holes on the walls as the eyewitness. The bullet holes on these deserted buildings reveal atrocities of war - scars evident of their pasts. Hsu utilises the unique mobile perspectives of a drone, using it as exposed photographic equipment and casting it as an actor anthropomorphically in the video. Aside from the shots taken by the drone, this video also includes several different shots, for instance, a scene of frosted bats in a big chimney. Frosted bats are mostly found in the high latitudes of Japan, Korea, and North China. Yet, for unknown reasons, this northern species of frosted bats resides in the chimney of the military plant from May to July in recent years. The plant is the only place where the frosted bats can be found in Taiwan. Moreover, the video contains footages of bombers from World War II when the United States allied with China to bomb Taiwan. However, this incident slowly faded as authorities shifted in the Asia- Pacific region. Hsu uses imageries of flying objects as essential elements of this video, including the original function of the fuel plant as an aviation fuel producer, drones, bats, and bombers.The video narration originated from memoirs of factory employees at the time. Nineteen oral accounts dubbed by four voice actors in Japanese and the video archive manipulated by a computer program are arranged randomly on the playlist to continually shift the structure of the video. As the narrator recounts: “After the War, most of the documents were incinerated. Quantity, date, people, accidents, sequence, cause and effects, shreds of evidence were all lost. Now, only the abstract and unreliable images remain.” Through the random calculations of the program, Hsu presents in this video the uncertainty of these memories and his response to the scattered historical text.Courtesy of the artistPhoto by CHIU Te-Hsin

A Slant of LightWANG Ya-hui2015-16

A Slant of Light

In my recording works, I feel particularly interested in the intersection, transformation, and state of flow present in an “image”. Facing the limitations and qualities of filming a video, as well as the “representation” and medium of photography, I return to the basics of “space” as the subject I explore. Recently from my forays into Chinese poetry and brushwork, I connect to my thoughts regarding the possibilities of space. The three series A Slant of Light, Question to Shadow, and Cast Me with a Shadow were produced in this process consecutively, and is a collection of my different methods. Is there potential to bring together the virtual and real, transformation, and flow found in the spatiality of ink and water, with a modern spatial sensation of light and shadow, and further to present it in “video”? Under this examination, I chose to initiate from the space of the ink color and the space of the lines, and then reroute back to photography. In this in and out, I traverse the middle ground between these two spaces, and in this series of implementations, I see another potential space of expression for video.I really like a passage that Shi Tao wrote in Bitter Melon and the Monk Philosophy of Painting: “The mountains, rivers and all things have their tangible forms, its negative and positive, its distortion and translation, its gathering and dispersal, its close and far, its inside and outside, its virtual and real, its disconnection and connection; its layering, its peeling, its volume, its furtiveness, this is the maxim of life.” When we see a landscape, what we see is not only the mountain. We come from an individual perspective to feel multiple layers of relations. Some of these relations express themselves as landscapes, some are more hidden auras. When one can feel these qualities, it means that something echoes on her or his heart. For example, in the particular moment when one’s heart twitches a bit when seeing a bare branch in the dead of winter, the existence of the world is different. It is like the world that a child feels instinctively, real and wondrous, and yet quotidian. I have always been trying to capture the objects of these moments. Using video to me has always been prophetic: it is this and yet is not. This looks like a paradox that cannot be (and needs not be) resolved; if you think about it closely, it bears deep meaning.Collection of the Art Bank Taiwan

Cast me with a shadow #2WANG Ya-hui2018

Cast me with a shadow #2

In my recording works, I feel particularly interested in the intersection, transformation, and state of flow present in an “image”. Facing the limitations and qualities of filming a video, as well as the “representation” and medium of photography, I return to the basics of “space” as the subject I explore. Recently from my forays into Chinese poetry and brushwork, I connect to my thoughts regarding the possibilities of space. The three series A Slant of Light, Question to Shadow, and Cast Me with a Shadow were produced in this process consecutively, and is a collection of my different methods. Is there potential to bring together the virtual and real, transformation, and flow found in the spatiality of ink and water, with a modern spatial sensation of light and shadow, and further to present it in “video”? Under this examination, I chose to initiate from the space of the ink color and the space of the lines, and then reroute back to photography. In this in and out, I traverse the middle ground between these two spaces, and in this series of implementations, I see another potential space of expression for video.I really like a passage that Shi Tao wrote in Bitter Melon and the Monk Philosophy of Painting: “The mountains, rivers and all things have their tangible forms, its negative and positive, its distortion and translation, its gathering and dispersal, its close and far, its inside and outside, its virtual and real, its disconnection and connection; its layering, its peeling, its volume, its furtiveness, this is the maxim of life.” When we see a landscape, what we see is not only the mountain. We come from an individual perspective to feel multiple layers of relations. Some of these relations express themselves as landscapes, some are more hidden auras. When one can feel these qualities, it means that something echoes on her or his heart. For example, in the particular moment when one’s heart twitches a bit when seeing a bare branch in the dead of winter, the existence of the world is different. It is like the world that a child feels instinctively, real and wondrous, and yet quotidian. I have always been trying to capture the objects of these moments. Using video to me has always been prophetic: it is this and yet is not. This looks like a paradox that cannot be (and needs not be) resolved; if you think about it closely, it bears deep meaning.Courtesy of the artist

Object Book Series #2: Les CarabiniersKAO Chung-Li2018

Object Book Series #2: Les Carabiniers

Object Book Series #2: Les Carabiniersmakes use of material objects with properties of industrial time, such as dry plate photographs by anonymous authors, like images from Jean-Luc Godard’s ultra-short film clip of the same title, or traces of human activities, such as a gas mask, an ensign, among other objects representing the reality, such as Ehagaki postcards. Like other works of the Object Book Series, Les Carabiniers is an endeavor of work that is able to narrate or present itself through the forms of documents or archives.Courtesy of the artist