Last week Jay Chou (
The news may or may not be true, but it helped boost the bets currently being made on-line about the longevity of the so-called "Chou-Hou love." Total bets on the PTT bulletin board system have broken NT$500,000, with most people betting the couple's already broken up but the news has yet to leak out.
Jerry Yan (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
The director of the TV show Friends, Roger Christiansen, was in town this week to check out the set of Taiwan's version of the popular American series. Though he can't speak a lick of Chinese, Christiansen gave the show, which will air on SETTV with a title that translates into "Living on the Left, Living on the Right" (
The controversy over remarks by Hong Kong superstar Jackie Chan (成龍) following the presidential election last year ridiculing Taiwanese politics was refried last week when the singer announced to reporters while basking under the Cannes sun that he will not be coming to Taiwan until the current president serves out his term, despite the fact that it wasn't the president who took exception to his comments and the possibility that the same thin-skinned bureaucrats will be in office in four years' time.
The non-story got some extra traction, though, when straight-talking director Hou Hsiao-hsien (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
The best headline this week in regional pop news went to our friends at the China Post for a story about Zhang Ziyi's difficulties starting a career in the US. "Hollywood hard for Asians, Says China's Zhang Ziyi," read the headline. Indeed. How else can one explain Bai Ling (
DJ babe and beauty queen Stacy Hsu (
Hong Kong beauty Michelle Lee (
PHOTO: AFP
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