Shintaro Miyake’s playfully exuberant and colorful, almost psychedelic pen and pencil artworks feature a wildly creative cast of creatures: clam-headed characters lined up in battle formation, or squid-like figures whose tentacles languidly reach out for enigmatic mottos — “anytime is calm” or “the hilltop of Mandarin fields.” A Commonplace Tale presents the Japanese artist’s latest apocalyptic creations, rendered in his neo-pop style.
■ Metaphysical Art Gallery (形而上畫廊), 7F, 219, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段219號7樓), tel: (02) 2711-0055. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 6:30pm
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 3pm. Until May 20
Photo courtesy of Metaphyscial Art Gallery
I didn’t know whether to run screaming from Li Zhuo’s (李卓) paintings of landscapes in monochrome ultramarine or forest green, or accept them passively as one might a nightmare. Either way, the Chinese artist’s new series of large-scale paintings in Lonely Again (我們再次孤獨) will almost certainly elicit a strong reaction. There is a terrifying realism to these forests populated with mostly naked vagabonds, suggesting human estrangement from and fear of a natural environment that needs to be conquered. The artist will attend the opening reception.
■ Nou Gallery (新畫廊), 232, Renai Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市仁愛路四段232號), tel: (02) 2700-0239. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 3:30pm. Until June 2
Photo courtesy of Nou Gallery
Arctic Diary: The Wrong Ice (極地日誌:錯誤的冰塊) is a video installation by Tsui Kuang-yu (崔廣宇), completed after he attended a residency program inside the Arctic Circle. Shot in Spitsbergen, Norway and Taipei City, Tsui’s work contemplates the far north’s extreme environment, which he calls “an exercise in self-exhaustion against the face of rugged nature,” and the densely populated urban space of Taipei.
■ MOCA Studio, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (台北當代藝術館, 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. Admission to Arctic Diary is free. General admission: NT$50
■ Until May 20
There have been several retrospectives over the past few years that have examined Taiwan’s modern history through the lens of a camera. To Gaze and to Look Beyond: Eyes of Formosa (凝視.對望-福爾摩莎之眼攝影展) falls within this category and presents the work of 28 contemporary photographers — who the National History Museum dubs “Eyes of Formosa” (對望-福爾摩莎之眼). Respected photographers Chang Chao-tang (張照堂) and Tseng Miin-shyong (曾敏雄) chose the works based on photographic aesthetics and the recording of social life and contemporary objects.
■ 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. General admission is NT$30
■ Begins Saturday. Until May 31
The term jinhuidui (錦灰堆 — literally a heap of refuse from ash) refers to a kind of literati montage painting originating in China’s Yuan Dynasty that takes used objects as its primary medium of creation. Contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Huan (張洹) has adopted the term to describe his new series of paintings, sculpture and installation in Jinhuidui (錦灰堆). It may seem strange that Zhang, an enfant terrible of China’s performance art scene in the 1990s, would draw upon a scholarly sub-genre, but the figurative and metaphorical motifs of detritus that underlie it seem eminently suited to his sensibility.
■ Gallery 100 (百藝畫廊), 6, Ln 30, Changan E Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市長安東路一段30巷6號), tel: (02) 2536-2120. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until May 27
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