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A scholar of media art and film reflects on his encounters with the work of Yuan Goang-Ming.
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University of Michigan professor Markus Nornes is a scholar of Asian cinema, documentary filmmaker, and international film festival programmer. In anticipation of Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War, the Taiwan-based artist’s first North American solo exhibition at the Asian Art Museum, we spoke with Nornes about what makes Yuan’s work so impressive that even seen-it-all Ann Arbor film festival audiences were left in awe.
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. From different images 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.
I find that the most important, innovative, and unique thread running through Yuan Goang-Ming’s video work has to do with perspective. As a viewer, you’re looking at places from this really new perspective, because everything is oriented around the lens axis. [Ed. note: “lens axis” is a photography term for an imaginary, perfectly straight line extending out from the exact center of a camera lens, much like one might imagine an invisible line, pointing exactly due north, extending from the needle of a compass.]
Camera work like you’d see in a typical Hollywood film is based on conventions that mimic the human experience of seeing. The placement and movements of the camera are linked to omniscient narration or to a certain character’s point of view. Either way, the audience is not meant to be aware of the camera.
But in Goang-Ming’s case, the movement of the camera— and as a result, what we see — is linked to the very center point of the lens. And it’s either moving perfectly forward and backward, or it’s spinning in the most precise way. Goang-Ming locks his camera down on the lens axis and he moves it back and forth with such precision, in ways that no one else in the world is doing.
This approach might feel cold and technical, 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, seemingly emotionless 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, where everyone has seen it at all. It’s 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.’
Based on a conversation with Tim Svenonius and Nick Stone.
