LAN CHUNGHSUAN

— LAN Chung-Hsuan, written in Taipei, late 2026

Each Modern is proud to present Under the Blue Sky, a solo exhibition by LAN Chung-Hsuan, featuring his latest series Under the Blue Sky (2026). Taking archival images of historical and contemporary massacres as a point of departure, LAN paints blue skies and white clouds over the bodies of the dead in these images, thereby questioning the viewer’s position and perspective when confronting such tragedies.

The blue sky and white clouds stem from a commonplace social rhetoric: when faced with things that cannot be known, understood, or responded to, people are often at a loss for words, turning instead to an unrelated pleasantry—“What beautiful weather today.” LAN translates this linguistic refuge into a visual experience of evasion: when death on the ground becomes too unbearable to look at, we attempt to search for the sky.

The ten works featured in this exhibition draw from massacres across different periods and regions. While these events caused significant loss of life and profound social consequences, they have not necessarily been continuously represented or widely circulated in the same way as certain highly canonized historical tragedies. Some have failed to establish a lasting place in collective memory, facing the possibility of remaining unknown, being overlooked, or gradually fading from public awareness.

From the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, which took place against the backdrop of American westward expansion and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, to the Bucha Massacre during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the works span more than a century of history. Despite the evolution of political systems, social values, and human rights, large-scale violence against civilians has never entirely disappeared. These tragedies, occurring across different eras and political systems, reveal the contradictions within the development of human civilization and invite us to reconsider how historical violence is documented, viewed, and remembered.

Photography and the circulation of images have brought tragedies once confined to particular locations into a broader public consciousness. Photographs of the My Lai Massacre in 1968 prompted the public to reconsider the atrocities of the Vietnam War, while images from Bucha in 2022 spread rapidly through digital media. Yet the circulation of images does not necessarily lead to understanding or remembrance. As images of violence continue to appear before us, do they bring us closer to historical reality, or have we gradually become accustomed to looking, even losing our ability to respond?

The artist obscures the bodies of the dead while preserving the locations where the massacres took place. These place names thus become more than geographical references; they serve as markers of historical violence. Blue skies and white clouds may conceal death within the images, but they cannot alter the fact that these deaths once occurred there.

The imagery of blue skies and white clouds also recalls the Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte. In his 1929 painting The False Mirror, Magritte places a blue sky and white clouds within a human eye. The eye appears to reflect the external world, but are we seeing reality itself, or an image constructed through consciousness? Vision is never entirely objective; it is inherently selective and subjective.

By comparison, LAN’s skies carry a more direct historical weight. When blue skies and white clouds cover the bodies of the dead in photographs of massacres, the sky is no longer merely a Surrealist device of defamiliarization. It may also become a metaphor for collective forgetting, visual desensitization, or even the beautification of history.

In the exhibition, the artist’s personal collection of war-related objects—including weapons, medals, archival documents, and military equipment—is displayed along a single wall. As material remnants beneath the blue sky, these objects contrast with the bodies gradually obscured by the sky in the paintings. Through their museum-like presentation, they offer viewers an alternative way of looking at acts of killing and the history of violence.

In Under the Blue Sky, the sky grows increasingly vivid while the bodies gradually vanish. This “coverage” is neither a glorification of violence nor a symbol of hope or healing through the sky. Rather, it materializes the psychological gesture of turning one’s eyes away when unable to respond, transforming it into a concrete visual form.

The tragedies still exist; it is just that when the weather is clear, they are placed well beyond our line of sight.