When Hsu Chia-chu (徐嘉駒) starts work at Apple Daily on Friday, he'll be one of several dozen photographers comprising that paper's full-time photographic staff. What sets him apart from his new colleagues is that he hasn't yet finished learning his trade.
Born in 1978, Hsu is currently studying Graphic Communication at Shih Hsin University. His first photos, he said, were mostly of the natural scenes found throughout his native Miaoli County. But with his first trip to the nation's capital, he began an aesthetic infatuation with the seemingly disparate images found throughout Taipei. It is his eye for capturing these images in a single frame that earned him a job at the nation's newest news daily.
A small exhibition of his works, which opened yesterday at the Taiwan International Visual Arts Center (TIVAC), is titled Drift in Taipei -- Still Life, but it is his images of living subjects and not his still lifes which are the exhibit's real draw.
Though the prints on display number fewer than a dozen, several deserve more than a few moments' perusal. A temple god being paraded through Hsimenting is set against the backdrop of a huge Calvin Klein underwear ad; the god glares angrily at the underwear model, who is crouched on all fours with her derriere seemingly stuck in the god's face. In another print, a beggar lays prostrate between thick white lines painted on the street, his belongings in a plastic bag tied to his belt loop. Hsu snapped the photo at a moment when the crowd happened to be on either side of the white lines, leaving the beggar kowtowing to empty space. The image ironically juxtaposes the social positions of the beggar and the throng of shoppers at his sides, giving the impression that the beggar rules the street and the shoppers pass only as he pleases.
"Taipei is such a multi-dimensional and advanced city, comprising cultural conflicts," Hsu said. "Students from the countryside are eager to come here."
Hsu's still-lifes, while not possessing the vibrancy of his animated subjects, still show his eye for interesting detail. His chosen subject matter for the TIVAC exhibit is a fork resting on an empty plate. But what makes the images interesting -- one image in particular -- is that Hsu has focused almost exclusively on the fork's shadow cast onto the plate's convex surface. Zoomed in, the tines of the fork and their warped shadows take on architectural proportions. It's only when you see the other prints where the handle of the fork and edge of the plate are visible that you realize what it is you're looking at.
The same can be said of Hsu. He may not yet have completed his education, but a close look at what he has already learned reveals what might well be a formidable future talent.
Drift in Taipei -- Still Life will show through May 14 on the basement level of the Taiwan International Visual Arts Center (
In the mainstream view, the Philippines should be worried that a conflict over Taiwan between the superpowers will drag in Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr observed in an interview in The Wall Street Journal last year, “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.” Such sentiments are widespread. Few seem to have imagined the opposite: that a gray zone incursion of People’s Republic of China (PRC) ships into the Philippines’ waters could trigger a conflict that drags in Taiwan. Fewer
March 18 to March 24 Yasushi Noro knew that it was not the right time to scale Hehuan Mountain (合歡). It was March 1913 and the weather was still bitingly cold at high altitudes. But he knew he couldn’t afford to wait, either. Launched in 1910, the Japanese colonial government’s “five year plan to govern the savages” was going well. After numerous bloody battles, they had subdued almost all of the indigenous peoples in northeastern Taiwan, save for the Truku who held strong to their territory around the Liwu River (立霧溪) and Mugua River (木瓜溪) basins in today’s Hualien County (花蓮). The Japanese
Pei-Ru Ko (柯沛如) says her Taipei upbringing was a little different from her peers. “We lived near the National Palace Museum [north of Taipei] and our neighbors had rice paddies. They were growing food right next to us. There was a mountain and a river so people would say, ‘you live in the mountains,’ and my friends wouldn’t want to come and visit.” While her school friends remained a bus ride away, Ko’s semi-rural upbringing schooled her in other things, including where food comes from. “Most people living in Taipei wouldn’t have a neighbor that was growing food,” she says. “So
Whether you’re interested in the history of ceramics, the production process itself, creating your own pottery, shopping for ceramic vessels, or simply admiring beautiful handmade items, the Zhunan Snake Kiln (竹南蛇窯) in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, is definitely worth a visit. For centuries, kiln products were an integral part of daily life in Taiwan: bricks for walls, tiles for roofs, pottery for the kitchen, jugs for fermenting alcoholic drinks, as well as decorative elements on temples, all came from kilns, and Miaoli was a major hub for the production of these items. The Zhunan Snake Kiln has a large area dedicated