BAPE, Proton, K-Swiss and Motorola are companies that manufacture completely different products — clothes, TVs, shoes and mobile phones — but all have worked with street artists to promote their wares.
In a world obsessed with cool and the next big thing, forward-thinking companies are desperate to impress trend-setting buyers. One of the easiest, and most successful, ways to do that is to associate their products with high-profile artists, and the cooler the better.
In Taipei, local street artists Reach and Ano tagged Proton TVs. UK legend She1 did a live painting for Royal Elastics in May. And K-Swiss flew out Fremantle and Grand High from France and the US respectively for K Spray 2 in April. Breaking away from this commercial trend, AMPM Gallery is taking back the street by hanging graffiti on its walls.
PHOTO COURTESY OF DBSK1
The appropriation of street art by company marketing machines sits awkwardly with an art form that is viewed as vandalism by authorities and the practitioners of which often break the law.
Despite its proliferation on the Internet, and use in slick PR campaigns, graffiti and stenciling retain a rebellious streak. Sharing that belief in rebelliousness, even if sometimes misplaced, like-minded artists have created grassroots communities.
DBSK1, a foreign graffiti artist living in Taipei, opened AMPM Gallery in March last year as a venue to showcase street art, free from the glare of authorities.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SARAH MCMASTER
DBSK1 and his old crew, Asia Nites, were frustrated with the availability and quality of places to display street art. They aimed to display less commercial forms of street art than big companies were using to market their products. "I'm not against [these corporate shows]," said DBSK1. "An artist, to a certain extent, has to support themselves and I understand doing crossover stuff. But it makes the scene more commercialized," and thus, "softer." What's lost, then, is the street edge or style. Through exhibiting work by local and foreign artists, AMPM aims to reconnect street art to unconformity, even if it is displayed in a gallery.
All of AMPM’s four shows so far have featured local talent. Love Hotel, the gallery’s first show, exhibited the work of 22 artists. The second, featured Beans & Bueller's twisted, yet cute, puppets roaming a post-apocalyptic city. AMPM’s last show displayed photography by Kent Dylan and finished yesterday.
So far, the shows have attracted a peculiar mix of foreigner party people, local graffiti kids, hipsters, and middle-aged spectators. "It's really cool; I really like [the mix we've got]," says DBSK1. "But it's not consistent. We want to hype" the venue and take it to the next level, to educate the general public about the art that's happening in their city.
AMPM’s Notebook exhibition starts Saturday and examines the artistic process. Over 20 artists' notebooks will be posted throughout the gallery, allowing viewers a rare glimpse into each individual's personal world and their creative process. Attendees are encouraged to take along their own sketches. The show of rough drafts, sketches, and random, spontaneous work provides a unique insight into members of Taipei’s art scene.
Sept. 1 to Sept. 7 In 1899, Kozaburo Hirai became the first documented Japanese to wed a Taiwanese under colonial rule. The soldier was partly motivated by the government’s policy of assimilating the Taiwanese population through intermarriage. While his friends and family disapproved and even mocked him, the marriage endured. By 1930, when his story appeared in Tales of Virtuous Deeds in Taiwan, Hirai had settled in his wife’s rural Changhua hometown, farming the land and integrating into local society. Similarly, Aiko Fujii, who married into the prominent Wufeng Lin Family (霧峰林家) in 1927, quickly learned Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and
The low voter turnout for the referendum on Aug. 23 shows that many Taiwanese are apathetic about nuclear energy, but there are long-term energy stakes involved that the public needs to grasp Taiwan faces an energy trilemma: soaring AI-driven demand, pressure to cut carbon and reliance on fragile fuel imports. But the nuclear referendum on Aug. 23 showed how little this registered with voters, many of whom neither see the long game nor grasp the stakes. Volunteer referendum worker Vivian Chen (陳薇安) put it bluntly: “I’ve seen many people asking what they’re voting for when they arrive to vote. They cast their vote without even doing any research.” Imagine Taiwanese voters invited to a poker table. The bet looked simple — yes or no — yet most never showed. More than two-thirds of those
In the run-up to the referendum on re-opening Pingtung County’s Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant last month, the media inundated us with explainers. A favorite factoid of the international media, endlessly recycled, was that Taiwan has no energy reserves for a blockade, thus necessitating re-opening the nuclear plants. As presented by the Chinese-language CommonWealth Magazine, it runs: “According to the US Department of Commerce International Trade Administration, 97.73 percent of Taiwan’s energy is imported, and estimates are that Taiwan has only 11 days of reserves available in the event of a blockade.” This factoid is not an outright lie — that
Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu’s (洪秀柱) attendance at the Chinese Communist Party’s (CPP) “Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War” parade in Beijing is infuriating, embarrassing and insulting to nearly everyone in Taiwan, and Taiwan’s friends and allies. She is also ripping off bandages and pouring salt into old wounds. In the process she managed to tie both the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) into uncomfortable knots. The KMT continues to honor their heroic fighters, who defended China against the invading Japanese Empire, which inflicted unimaginable horrors on the
RSS