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
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
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
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