When a community public art project sensitively takes on the concerns of the local residents, the project becomes more than just decorative baubles as in the case of the Tainan's Hai-an Road public art, which are mainly facades of buildings painted and decorated by Taiwanese artists.
In contrast, organizers and artists of the 2nd Taipei Public Art Festival (
Artist Huang Tzi-chin (
PHOTO: SUSAN KENDZULAK, TAIPEI TIMES
The famed Confucious Temple on Dalong Street now houses a controversial installation by Chung Wen-yin (鍾文音) titled My Classroom of Grannies Return to Frozen Moments Among Tables, Chairs. It includes hot-pink gauzy curtains and displays photos of famous female authors such as Eileen Chang, Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag, as well as images of local women and family members.
Confucian temples are known for revering the work and achievements of male scholars, not female ones. The director of the temple strongly urged the artist and curator to not install the piece because she thought it may be offensive to the regular temple-goers, since the installation contained a heavy feminist slant with the look of a bordello. However, the artist and curator didn't back down, and the informative installation remains a popular and well-visited site.
Originally from Taiwan, artist and community activist Lily Yeh (
PHOTO: SUSAN KENDZULAK, TAIPEI TIMES
Yeh came to Taipei and did art workshops with students at the Taipei School for the Hearing Impaired (
9:30pm on weekdays and from 9am to 9:30pm on weekends. If you would like to participate in this vital community project please contact Sandy Lo (
Lo represented Taiwan as one of the curators of Shanghai Cool, which recently ended at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition included curators with their selected artists from Japan, China and South Korea. For Lo's section titled Pop Pill, she included pop manga artist Hung Tung-lu (
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