Mia Liu’s (劉文瑄) first performance art piece took place at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Well, kind of. Liu, 31, had been working at the museum as a ticket taker while doing an MFA at Hunter College when she came up with the idea of printing the title of her own show on the museum’s tickets. Fearful of losing her job, however, she only handed out a few. She then came up with another plan — to display her work in the museum’s staff room.
“Then I could put on my resume that I’d had a solo show at the Guggenheim,” Liu said. She approached her boss with the idea, “and he looked at me like I was crazy,” she said.
It’s unfortunate Liu didn’t take either action to any kind of conclusion because it would have subverted the museum’s curatorial policies, raised interesting questions as to how artists exhibit at major art museums and offered a reconsideration of what constitutes museum space (should we consider a staff room part of Guggenheim’s exhibition area?).
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei times, and courtesy of Mia Liu
Though an official Guggenheim show has yet to materialize for Liu, she did convince the museum to sell her 200,000 of its tickets, 60,000 of which she has used in Guggen’ Dizzy, a large-scale trompe l’oeil sculptural triptych currently on view at IT Park. The sculpture is part of I Can’t Tell You, but You Feel It (我無法告訴你), a solo show of her work that includes photography and installation. This review focuses on the sculpture.
Guggen’ Dizzy appeals because its simple elements combine in a way to create complex visual illusions reminiscent of optical art. Liu began the work with a series of doodles, sketches and drawings of basic geometric objects, scanned the bits into a computer and pieced them together to form a template of the sculpture’s overall design.
With the help of assistants, she attached, one by one, 20,000 tickets to one of three circular boards, each made up of six concentric circles. Colored masking tape was stuck to the edges of the tickets, that when combined form the original patterns. The boards were then mounted onto metal brackets and clamped onto a motor, which when switched on rotates slowly. The three-panel sculpture took three years to complete.
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei times, and courtesy of Mia Liu
Watching the sculptures rotate is a thing to behold because the colors and shapes constantly shift depending on how light is refracted off their surfaces. Are they a kind of mandala, meant as a prompt to contemplate the flux and impermanence of existence? Or perhaps their constantly changing appearance is a metaphor for the contingency of human perception.
Liu offered a more mundane explanation.
“It’s just about mixing different colors with light [based] on patterns that I draw on a daily basis,” she said.
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei times, and courtesy of Mia Liu
Reflecting on the exhibit’s title, Liu’s meaning becomes clear. We aren’t supposed to use our reason to look for any deeper meaning, but feel and experience the sculpture’s aesthetic beauty.
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei times, and courtesy of Mia Liu
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei times, and courtesy of Mia Liu
Photo: Noah Buchan, Taipei times, and courtesy of Mia Liu
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Snoop Dogg arrived at Intuit Dome hours before tipoff, long before most fans filled the arena and even before some players. Dressed in a gray suit and black turtleneck, a diamond-encrusted Peacock pendant resting on his chest and purple Chuck Taylor sneakers with gold laces nodding to his lifelong Los Angeles Lakers allegiance, Snoop didn’t rush. He didn’t posture. He waited for his moment to shine as an NBA analyst alongside Reggie Miller and Terry Gannon for Peacock’s recent Golden State Warriors at Los Angeles Clippers broadcast during the second half. With an AP reporter trailing him through the arena for an
RSS