At the Bottom of a Hundred Flowers, Secrets Are Hidden (百花深處˙無盡藏) showcases abstract works by Tsai Yuan-sheng (蔡元勝). Tsai’s large and medium canvases blend elements of Western abstraction (geometric shapes) and Eastern expressionism (rippled and curved lines), and are built up using thick earthy colors
■ Powen Gallery (紅野畫廊), 77 Guoan 1st Road, Situn Dist, Greater Taichung (台中市西屯區國安一路77號), tel: (04) 2463-3239. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 2pm. Until Aug. 31
Photo courtesy of Powen Gallery
99 Degrees Art Center (99度藝術中心) will open a four-person exhibition of artists working in various genres of landscape painting. The artists are Chiu Hsien-te (邱顯德), a landscape ink wash painter; abstract expressionist Chen Hsien-tung (陳顯棟); postmodernist ink painting experimenter Lo Ching (羅青); and landscape photographer Alan Chiang (蔣易修).
■ 99 Degrees Art Center (99度藝術中心), 5F, 259, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段259號5樓), tel: (02) 2700-3099. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 6:30pm
■ Begins Saturday. Until Sept. 7
Mosquito Nail Shan Shui (蚊釘山水) presents 17 works by Howard Chen (陳浚豪). The exhibition encompasses 17 recent works, illustrating Chen’s intricate use of industrial materials — hundreds of thousands of what the artist calls “mosquito nails,” which are shot into the canvas with a nail gun to recreate famous “mountain-water” (山水) paintings from Chinese history.
■ Tina Keng Gallery (大未來耿畫廊), 15, Ln 548, Ruiguang Rd, Taipei City (台北市瑞光路548巷15號), tel: (02) 2659-0798. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 7pm
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 4:30pm. Until Aug. 28
Entre-Temps — The Narrative Artist brings together 21 video-art pieces by 21 artists who are either French or have pursued careers in France. The works are on loan from the Municipal Museum of Modern Art in Paris and represent some of the finest examples of video art collected by that institution over the past 10 years. According to a TFAM press release, the chosen works have a quality similar to the narrative style of the nouveau roman (the subordination of plot and character to objects) literary genre, as well as close connections to French literary theory and experimental narratives of the 1960s and 1970s. Christian Boltanski, Douglas Gordon, Julien Discrit and Philippe Parreno are among the represented artists.
■ Taipei Fine Arts Museum (台北市立美術館), 181, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市中山北路三段181號), tel: (02) 2595-7656. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9:30am to 5:30pm; open until 8:30pm on Saturdays. Admission: NT$30
■ Begins Saturday. Until Nov. 6
Broken Vessels — Proliferation and Regeneration (破容器:增生與新生) is a solo exhibit of surreal ceramic sculptures of human anatomy and mundane objects by Hsu Chung-en (許仲恩). The sculptures serve as a metaphor for the insubstantial nature of existence.
■ Yingge Ceramics Museum (鶯歌陶瓷博物館), 200 Wenhua Rd, Yingge Dist, New Taipei City (新北市鶯歌區文化路200號), tel: (02) 8677-2727. Open daily from 9:30am to 5pm, closes at 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays
■ Until Aug. 21
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
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless