Never Ending Construction is a group exhibition by three Japanese artists working in installation and painting. The paintings of Reika Nakayama, who resides in Mexico, feature a background of vivid, colorful patterns in acrylic paint, to which she has added dynamic pencil drawings of animals and human figures. Sakae Ozawa creates a playful world of little girls in billowing dresses flirting with flying whales and dancing bears. Paramodel, an “art unit” comprising Yasuhiko Hayashi and Yusuke Nakano, transforms the gallery space with their large installations comprising flowing lines and abstract geometric patterns.
■ Aki Gallery (也趣藝廊), 141 Minzu W Rd, Taipei City (台北市民族西路141號), tel: (02) 2599-1171. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from noon to 6:30pm
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 3pm. Until March 4
Photo Courtesy of Aki Gallery
Polyphony Beat (複音。節拍) is a dual exhibition of paper sculpture by Chu Wei-bor (朱為白) and Mia Liu (劉文瑄). The show seeks to show viewers the diversity and range of contemporary paper sculpture.
■ Kalos Gallery (真善美畫廊), 269, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段269號), tel: (02) 2836-3452. Open daily from 10am to 6:30pm, closed Sundays
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 3pm. Until March 3
Photo Courtesy of Eslite Gallery
Book From the Sky to the Ground (從天書到地書) is a retrospective exhibit on the work of Chinese artist Xu Bing (徐冰). Xu’s installations question the notion that meaning can be communicated through language and how written words and symbols can be manipulated. In 1999, he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award for his originality and contribution to printmaking and calligraphy.
■ Eslite Gallery (誠品畫廊), 5F, 11 Songgao Rd, Taipei City (台北市松高路11號5樓), tel: (02) 8789-3388 X1588. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 3pm. Until April 1
Wonderland: New Contemporary Art From Australia is a wide-ranging exhibition that surveys art from Down Under. The 45 artworks by 24 artists include found objects, sculpture, documentary video, painting and interactive installation. The “richly illustrated catalogue,” says MOCA’s press blurb, brings together “22 prominent critics to introduce the historical and cultural contexts within which each artist has evolved their practice.”
■ Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA, Taipei), 39 Changan W Rd, Taipei City (台北市長安西路39號), tel: (02) 2552-3720. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm. General admission: NT$50
■ Opening reception on Friday from 7pm to 9pm. Until April 15
In Girls — Spring (女孩春), Isa Ho (何孟娟) explores the traditional and (often) constricting roles of women in Taiwanese society and females’ quests for self-expression. Ho views her new series of photographs, which are shot from a bottom up perspective so that the viewer is constantly focused on the sky, as an “escape from the perspectives and values of seeing.”
■ InArt Gallery (加力畫廊), 315 Youai St, Tainan City (台南市友愛街315號), tel: (06) 221-3638. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 1pm to 9pm
■ Until March 11
Turning a Blind Eye (再見不尋常小事) is a joint exhibit of video and drawing by three Taiwanese artists. The videos of Chang Li-ren (張立人), winner of the 2009 Taipei Arts Awards (臺北美術獎), meditate on the changing ideas of beauty through images of women culled from Western art history. Lin Guan-ming’s (林冠名) drawings examine the estrangement of humans from the natural environment, which he views as a peculiar aspect of industrial and urban societies. Huang Hai-hsin (黃海欣) assembles news media images in videos that blur the line between fiction and reality.
■ Agora Art Space (藝譔堂), 104, Ln 155, Dunhua N Rd, Taipei City (台北市敦化北路155巷104號), tel: (02) 8712-0178. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until March 17
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your