Photographica Australis, a traveling exhibition of photography by 15 contemporary Austrian artists, has reached its last stop in Taipei. Currently showing at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (
Organized by the Australian Centre for Photography, Photographica Australis aims to help Asian viewers take note of the diversity of Austrian culture.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TFAM
"The title of the exhibition is in Latin as a reference to the scientific naming of plants in biology. While bio-diversity is important in nature, cultural diversity is of equal importance," said Alasdair Foster, curator of the exhibition.
In presenting a wide spectrum of Australian photography, Foster includes different generations of artists working with various techniques and sub-genres, but has excluded big names such as Bill Henson and Tracey Moffatt. "These artists are important in Australia, but not necessarily known internationally. In mapping the wholeness of a culture, you can't look at only those at the top. Therefore I have juxtaposed younger and older artists here for you to get a better picture of Australian photography," Foster said.
The are three sections to the show "Bio-diversity," the first section, is a compact showcase of the ideas, styles and methodologies prevalent in Australia today.
In Esperanto of Vision, Phillip George uses digital manipulation to create a panorama of a coast near Sydney, where the first European immigrants landed on the continent. Iconographic images of different cultures are combined to form its landscape. China's Great Wall sits on the distant mountains, ancient Greek architecture faces the waves, with ancient Indian statues nearby. The cultures living in today's Australia, the images seem to suggest, are exactly the same as those in other parts of the world millennia ago.
Martin Walch's Six Traces in Four Dimensions invites visitors to take a look at the landscape of a mining site in Tasmania through stereo viewers. The work is a reaction to Australian environmentalists' call to stop mining in the area on account of the damage mining does to its natural landscape. In Walch's view, the Tasmania landscape is artificial in essence. The man-made environment is simply the area's primordial form. The environmentalist has too sentimental a notion of ecology, he suggests. To stress the point, laser beams sweep the landscape to create images of rivers and mountains covered with strips of light.
The second section "Art and Suburbia" deals with the making of art in the interacting contexts of art history and suburban life.
Glenn Sloggett is known for his love of irony and contradiction. Sloggett's Untitled Series documents in a tongue-in-cheek manner sights on the suburban streets. There is a budget-burial company van with the slogan "cheaper and deeper" across its window and a rundown corner shop whose signboard claims that it serves Melbourne's best cappuccino among other street oddities.
The "Intersection" section explores the construction of meaning and the formation of identity. The work that reflects the themes best may be Brenda Croft's Contact/Warra Warra, a collage about the first European immigrants' mistaking native phrase "Warra Warra" for "welcome," when the Aborigines were actually telling them to "go away."
The history of the interaction between Aborigines and European immigrants is a recurring background to the works, but the artists' mature photographic techniques and entrancing creative expressions are probably the most enjoyable aspects of the exhibition.
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