Kaohsiung takes pride in its heritage as a major shipping port and has gone all out to promote the 2003 Kaohsiung International Container Arts Festival, being held at the Star of the Sea pier area until Jan. 11 and which includes an art exhibition, community art activities and various performances.
The first container arts festival took place in 2001 and had many of the artists refer to the container as a mode of transport for cargo, contraband, or human smuggling. This time the curated show with the theme of "post-civilization" has stepped away from alluding to the container as a means of shipment, but rather as a site for entertainment. More than 90 artists from Taiwan and around the world have participated in the show.
Taiwan's Soul-Skool Graffiti Crew captures the spirit of the festival with their work. Walking on train tracks to a loud pulsing hip-hop beat through several graffiti-painted containers, one feels the excitement of urban spaces minus the sense of danger. In other words, pure entertainment.
PHOTO: SUSAN KENDZULAK
Kaohsiung's Sin Pin Pier Absolutely Art Space placed three containers in a precarious gravity-defying pyramid. One of the steeply inclined containers evokes the arduous mountain life of an Aboriginal.
Some artists used technology to reference the show's theme. In Hsu Jui-Hsien's (
A few containers by local art groups such as Taichung's Stock 20 and Chiayi's Tirosen use the containers as a basic white cube (i.e. gallery space) and install rather banal paintings and sculptures, basically ignoring the waterfront site or the function of a container, which is quite unfortunate, as these groups are known for much more provocative work.
However other artists try to link the site in their work. The interactive Periscope by Linda Tedsdotter allows the viewer to stand on a pedestal and look through the lens out to sea. Norwegian Marianne Heske brings the sounds of an ice-breaking ship cutting through the ice of a fjord, thus linking her home country's waterways to the Love River site.
One of the most successful installations, by Norbert Francis Attard from Malta, is poetic, complex, and yet simple. Standing at the doorway, the inside of the container, serving as a metaphor for our inner life, is filled with water and a motor pushes it out to sea. Visually, the water inside the container appears connected to the river outside, which would represent the exterior world.
Interspersed with the art were popcorn stands and souvenir stands to buy container-themed items such as pencils, boxes, key chains, etc., making it appear that the art is merely an entertainment backdrop serving corporate interests. A serious art event promoting provocative and innovative thought. Maybe not. A fun gathering place for the entire family to walk around, smell the sea, see the sights and to buy souvenirs. Most definitely.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby