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Dwelling: Yuan Goang-Ming Solo Exhibition  My creative work has always drawn directly from my personal life experience and from the imagery of the everyday world. But while on the one hand my art reflects reality, on the other it also seeks to create a kind of reversal or subversion of real-world imagery, as a means of challenging the typical take-it-for-granted attitude of people today. The appearance of these ‘subverted’ images opens up an alternative space of speculation, causing the audience to experience the uncanny sensation of existing between something familiar and something strange and unknown, and giving them an entirely new ‘view’ of reality. Beginning in 2001, I began to expand my narrative focus from my purely autobiographical experience to a wider gaze that encompasses the contemporary state of urbanization and globalization, as a means of exposing typical thinking patterns in Taiwan today: ‘The ideal place exists somewhere else’; the subconscious tendency to ‘do away with localized places’ in favour of a kind of typical hybrid city that can change its appearance and identity at any time; and a kind of indefinable feeling of self-alienation and displacement, of not quite recognizing where one is. Under our current conditions of time and space, both our ‘sense of place and our idea of ‘home’ have become weakened and tenuous, and our memories of the cities in which we live are becoming increasingly blurred. The present exhibition can be described as a conceptual extension of the themes of ‘home’ and ‘ruins’ that I began exploring in 2007, expanding the scope to the overall state of contemporary existence, in particular that everyday sense of anxiety and unease that arises from the feelings of uncertainty, ambiguity, and floating that permeate the realms of politics, society and home in our island nation of Taiwan. The exhibition title was inspired by a 1951 essay by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), called “...Poetically Man Dwells...”. The title of Heidegger’s essay was in turn borrowed from a poem by the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). In his discussion, Heidegger points out that humans exist together with heaven, earth, and god, and that it is only when there is a symbiotic harmony among the four that the state of dwelling/settling can be actualized in reality. But given the conditions of contemporary reality, what kind of possibility exists for us to ‘dwell poetically’ in our world? Our only option is to strive together towards a state of true poetic dwelling: otherwise, we will surely fall together.

Yuan Goang-Ming September 2015 (Translated by Valerie C. Doran)