Youth on the edge
Chen Hui-chiao once described Yuan as "passionate, flashy, overbearing, and hot-blooded, yet at the same time tense and angst-ridden, as if something were weighing heavily upon him."
Pretty much every time he puts on an exhibit, he can be seen before the opening fretting about how "the exhibit seems to be missing something." In the end, he always gets on with the show, but he puts himself through hell in the process.
Every artist draws inspiration from different sources. Yuan frankly concedes that his inspiration comes from "a discomfort with the mysteries of life, and with time," so he has never worked comfortably. It is only after a work is finished that he gets a brief respite.
Perhaps his emotional state as an artist derives from his experiences as a youth. Yuan explains that he had emerged as a stellar student in elementary school, but in his third year of junior high he and some friends took to smoking and listening to pop music by day, then studying late into the night. "It's not that we had gone bad. We just couldn't stay awake in class. That whole year was a waste."
Yuan scored horribly on the national high-school entrance exam. His book-loving father registered him for an admission test to Fu-Hsin Trade and Arts School. He tested in, but "just couldn't get into it." Feeling too good for his surroundings, every day he would skip classes, get into fights, and spend time in dance halls.
"One time I was out in Xi-men-ding and some guys thought I was acting too cocky, so they came over and beat me up. I was knocked unconscious. It was my friends who got me back home. My dad felt that things had gotten too far out of hand, so he suggested that I transfer to night school." A tinge of the old cockiness creeps into Yuan's voice as he recounts his past.
The other night-school students were all older, working for a living, and feeling an urgent need to make up for their lack of education. The exposure prompted in Yuan a sense of regret for his own waste of time. He buckled down and tested into the Department of Fine Arts at the National Institute of the Arts (NIA). Driven by his interest in the topic of "time," he concentrated his efforts on the study of video recording.
In the 1980s, amidst the golden age of Taiwan's New Wave Cinema, the arts world began to contemplate what could be accomplished with video recording outside the ambit of cinema. Yuan's personal interest and the tide of history converged, and Yuan leapt to the forefront of contemporary art.
Two works that he executed as a university student, On the Way Home and Fish on Dish, illustrate better than anything the angst at the core of his artistic inspiration.
Yuan got NIA professor Su Shou-zheng to play the lead role in On the Way Home, which depicts the daily life of a teacher. It rains continually as the teacher trudges in solitude back to his home, where he opens the door and enters to find the sink in his bathroom overflowing. There is no plot or startling twist in the story line, yet the video is taut with suspense. With this experimental piece, the fresh new face walked off with a Golden Harvest Award in 1990.
Fish on Dish, meanwhile, is a piece of installation art in which the image of a beautiful goldfish is projected onto a white ceramic dish. At first blush the goldfish appears to be swimming about without a care. It's quite a beautiful image. However, as the seconds and minutes slide by, the goldfish never manages to swim beyond the confines of the dish. "Carefree" gradually morphs into "confinement," and the viewer comes to share the hopelessness of the goldfish.
In Disappearing Landscape-Scotland, Yuan introduces additional images and a blurred style.