Image: Yuan Goang-Ming, still from Everyday War, 2024, single-channel video with sound. © Yuan Goang-Ming. Courtesy of the artist
Wrightwood 659 in Chicago will present ‘Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War’, an immersive large-scale installation adapted from the Taiwan Pavilion exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Organized by Halsted A&A Foundation at Wrightwood 659, the exhibition will run from September 25 through December 19, 2026, with tickets scheduled to go on sale August 27.
The presentation brings together Yuan Goang-Ming’s video and installation works in an environment shaped by sound. Audio from multiple works will merge throughout the galleries, creating what Wrightwood 659 describes as a distinctive soundscape. The installation includes ‘Prophecy’ (2014), a kinetic table in which glasses and dinnerware are shaken by an unseen threat, turning a familiar domestic setting into a scene of instability.
Yuan is widely recognized as a pioneer of Taiwan’s new media art scene. His practice is described by Wrightwood 659 as starkly poetic, addressing the fragmented and surreal character of contemporary life through video and installation. In ‘Everyday War’, domestic interiors, streets and other ordinary environments become settings in which the possibility of disruption is continuously present.
The exhibition’s imagery is informed by the geopolitics of Taiwan and by Yuan’s experience growing up as the child of a war refugee. His immersive films move between the eerie stillness of empty streets during Taiwan’s annual air raid drills and the chaotic aftermath of an explosion detonated in a living room. These contrasts connect large-scale political tensions with the routines and spaces of everyday life.
The works use intimate environments as metaphors for wider instability, including the unpredictable intrusion of war into the home. The Chicago exhibition is based on the presentation at the Taiwan Pavilion of the 60th Venice Biennale, which was curated by Abby Chen, curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. The exhibition is supported in part by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture.
Wrightwood 659 is a Chicago exhibition space dedicated to architecture and socially engaged art. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando, the space occupies a transformed 1920s building at 659 W. Wrightwood Avenue in the city’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, and it describes itself as a private, non-commercial initiative. ‘Everyday War’ opens alongside ‘Inner Worlds: Visions from the Hirshhorn Collection’, which the venue lists on the same dates. For ‘Everyday War’, advance tickets are required; the venue lists admission at $20 and says tickets are limited to ensure optimal viewing conditions.
