Stencil and graffiti artist Kea couldn’t have imagined that one day he’d be working on the walls of Taipei City Hall. Routinely nabbed for spraying less famous buildings around the capital, he sometimes found himself spending the night in detention at a police station.
“[The police] were usually curious and didn’t lecture me too much about what I was doing,” Kea, 29, told the Taipei Times on Tuesday night in the plaza across from the entrance of Taipei City Hall where he was checking out his latest handiwork. “Besides, I was trying to beautify not disfigure the [urban] scenery.”
Beautify is exactly what Kea has done. But rather than sneaking around in the dead of night graffitiing walls, Kea, along with seven other artists, was invited by the city to project his art on to the front of Taipei City Hall in celebration of this year’s Lantern Festival. The building will undergo a makeover of sorts — though only daily from 7pm to 11pm from today until Feb. 15.
The other artists, who work in a broad range of styles such as calligraphy and Aboriginal art, are Dong Yang Zi (董陽孜), Wu Keng-chen (吳耿禎), Qui Ruo-long (邱若龍), Yan Shui-long (顏水龍), Wu Sheng (吳晟), Qui Xi-xun (邱錫勳) and Xiao Qing-yang (蕭青陽).
“[City Hall’s facade] is like a huge canvas,” said Chris Huang (黃茂嘉), one of the event’s organizers who picked the eight artists. “Some artists had difficulty adjusting to such a large size.”
Huang is the Taiwan representative of Pani Projection and Lighting, the company that operates the 24 large-scale projectors that beam the artists’ images onto City Hall and which has done work for the Rolling Stones, Chemical Brothers and U2. He said the artists were chosen for their diverse ages and skills in their respective fields.
The projections complement the other more traditional festivities that feature various small and large-scale lanterns designed in the shape of the ox.
Lantern Festival celebrations in Taipei will also be held in the Xinyi (信義) business district, including at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and several parks and plazas in the area.
The Taiwan Lantern festival began in 1990 when the Tourism Bureau instituted an annual national show to coincide with the traditional custom of carrying lanterns on the 15th day of the first lunar month of the New Year.
Ilan County was chosen to host this year’s festival, the centerpiece of which is an 18.3m-tall display of a water buffalo tilling a verdant rice paddy, an image that symbolizes prosperity. The opening ceremony begins at the Yilan Sports Park (宜蘭運動公園) on Monday with a fireworks display and runs until Feb. 22.
Taipei City Hall’s caretaker can rest easy as the building will not be plastered with the work of eight graffiti artists as was suggested in yesterday’s edition. The ‘Taipei Times’ regrets the error.
Michael slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great. Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted. Michael doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts.
The March/April volume of Foreign Affairs, long a purveyor of pro-China pablum, offered up another irksome Beijing-speak on the issues and solutions for the problems vexing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the US: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back From the Brink” rang the provocative title, by David M. Lampton and Wang Jisi (王緝思). If one ever wants to describe what went wrong with US-PRC relations, the career of Wang Jisi is a good place to start. Wang has extensive experience in the US and the West. He was a visiting
The January 2028 presidential election is already stirring to life. In seven or eight months, the primary season will kick into high gear following this November’s local elections. By this point next year, we will likely know the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate and whether the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) will be fielding a candidate. Also around this time, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) will either have already completed their primary, or it will be heading into the final stretch. By next summer, the presidential race will be in high gear. The big question is who will be the KMT’s
One of the challenges with the sheer availability of food in today’s world is that lots of us end up spending many of our waking hours eating. Whether it’s full meals, snacks or desserts, scientists have found that it’s not uncommon for us to be mindlessly grazing at some point during all of our 16 or so waking hours. The problem? As soon as this food hits the bloodstream in the form of glucose, it initiates the release of the hormone insulin. This in turn activates a switch present in every one of our cells, which is responsible for driving cell
RSS