The National Palace Museum will open an exhibit this weekend on Czech art nouveau painter and decorative artist Alphonse Mucha. Alphonse Mucha — Art Nouveau and Utopia offers a snapshot of this prolific artist’s body of work, including his renowned fin de siecle posters and decorative works, as well as an introduction to his lesser-known drawings, paintings, pastels, jewelry and photographs, which reveals the breadth and complexity of his creative vision.
■ Library Building, National Palace Museum (國立故宮博物院圖書文獻大樓), 221, Zhishan Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市至善路二段221號), tel: (02) 2881-2021. Open daily from 9am to 5pm. Admission: NT$250
■ Begins on Saturday. Until Sept. 12
Photo courtesy of NPM
“All I really care about is me,” and “If I have to explain my work, it’s very hard to explain well by [discussing it],” are among the more ridiculous statements found in the press release for Welcome to the Black Hole Inside of Me (歡迎光臨黑洞中心), an exhibit by Cute Li (李明瑜). With those statements — and that name — we can expect a narcissistic artist who is incapable of explaining what he is up to. The medium is performance art. The message? Look at me. Perhaps Li will provide an explanation of what he is doing when he gives a lecture at the opening reception on Saturday.
■ Barry Room, Taipei Artist Village (台北國際藝術村百里廳), 7 Beiping E Rd, Taipei City (台北市北平東路7號), tel: (02) 3393-7377. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 9pm
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 5:30pm. Until July 3
Literature, architecture, baseball and science fiction are among the subjects Mexican artist Humberto Duque focuses on in Future Bedrooms of Foreign Wars. Duque’s installations attempt to “incite puzzling sceneries” by combining different elements “into a new and puzzling universe.” The elements that make up such scenarios can be models of impossible structures, or artifacts with inexplicable purposes. The goal of his work is to leave hints or traces that allude to possibilities of a time that is not ours. The artist will discuss his work at a lecture on the museum’s third floor on Tuesday at 10am.
■ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (關渡美術館), 1 Xueyuan Rd, Taipei City (台北市學園路1號), tel: (02) 2893-8870. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 5pm
■ Until June 15
Monologue of the Brave (勇者的獨白) is a new series of paintings by Wang Ting-yu (王挺宇). Wang’s monochrome paintings are built up with rubbing and polishing, after which he adds paint. The artist’s working process becomes “a self-examination [whereby the] images are viewed with an aim to analyze [the] physicality of paintings versus flatness of images,” according to the gallery’s exhibition blurb.
■ Project Fulfill Art Space (就在藝術空間), 2, Alley 45, Ln 147, Xinyi Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市信義路三段147巷45弄2號), tel: (02) 2707-6942. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 1pm to 6pm
■ Until July 17
Pioneer of Modern Taiwanese Woodcut Art (開路先鋒) is a memorial exhibit on the work and life of Chiang Han-tung (江漢東). Chiang’s woodcuts, engravings and prints draw upon a variety of modernist styles — avant-garde, abstraction and surrealism — that were popular during the 1950s to 1970s, which he gradually combined with more traditional styles of the East. The exhibit includes objects that span the artist’s entire career.
■ National Museum of History (國立歷史博物館), 49 Nanhai Rd, Taipei City (台北市南海路49號), tel: (02) 2361-0270. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm. Admission: NT$30
■ Until Sunday
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and