Drawing on his own personal experience witnessing the collapse of Keelung’s fishing and mining industries, Lien Chien-hsing’s (連建興) new series of paintings, Between Reality and Fiction: Sceneries of the Mind (擬像風景), depicts surreal landscapes of dilapidated buildings and abandoned parks populated with all manner of beast, both mythical and real. According to Eslite’s press release, the paintings not only inspire fear due to loss, but also coalesce “a civilizational memory of a particular time” that seeks to create a “space of spiritual transcendence and elevated consciousness.” They do just that without over-sentimentalizing what has been lost.
■ 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
■ Until July 8
Photo Courtesy of Eslite Gallery
The press release for Unique Expression (南瀛奇葩), a solo exhibit by Huang Teng-shan (黃登山), starts out with these heady words: “With his bold and generous character, sensitivity for color and expertise in calligraphy, Huang Teng-shan has developed a unique expression of painting, in different media including oil, pastel and ink.” Perhaps, but the works on display, landscapes, cityscapes and still lifes dated between 2000 and 2012, do little to broaden the genres in which they are painted.
■ Art Den (藝研齋), 3F, 309, Xinyi Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市信義路四段309號3樓), tel: (02) 2325-8188. Open Mondays to Fridays from 11am to 5pm, and Saturdays from 10am to 6pm
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 3pm. Until July 21
Photo Courtesy of Wisteria Tea House
First Exit Existence II (真實的存在 II) is a duo exhibition of sculpture by Lin Chih-heng (林志恆) and Hong Chien-che (洪健哲), both of whom take the natural world — trees, rocks and plants — as the starting point to create moderately interesting abstract works.
■ 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 July 1
Sojourning a Veiled World (逆旅悠塵) presents a new series of charcoal-on-paper drawings by France-based artist Leung Siu Hay (梁兆熙). Fossils, trees, horses and flowers are among the subjects Leung depicts with a realistic style tinged with expressive — and expressionist — line flourishes that reveal an artistic disposition, the gallery’s press release suggests, reminiscent of a the Northern Song Dynasty landscape painting.
■ Wisteria Tea House (紫藤廬), 1, Ln 16, Xinsheng S Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市新生南路三段16巷1號), tel: (02) 2363-7375. Open daily from 10am to 11pm
■ Until July 15
Dubbed the first biennial of video art in southern Taiwan, the Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition (台灣國際錄影藝術展) brings together 55 video works — ranging in length from 58 seconds to 58 minutes — by artists from Taiwan, Sweden, Spain, the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan and the US. Curated by Chen Yung-hsien (陳永賢) and Sean C.S. Hu (胡朝聖), the exhibition has two themes, Eattopia and Dwellng Place, both of which ask the viewer to ponder the relationship between the food we eat and its effects on where we live. Exhibiting artists include Chen Chieh-jen (陳界仁), Tsai Char-wei (蔡佳葳) and recent Taishin Arts Award-winner Jao Chia-en (饒加恩).
■ Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, 80 Meishuguan Rd, Greater Kaohsiung (高雄市美術館路80號), tel: (07) 555-0331. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9am to 5pm. Admission: Free
■ Until Sept. 9
New Zealand artist Kerry Ann Lee, an international artist-in-residence at Taipei Artists Village, will give a one-off presentation of her art project at the Ruin Academy (廢墟建築學院), an abandoned building close to Ximen MRT Station, Exit 2 (西門捷運站2號出口). The Parallel City Picture Show is a slide projection installation of lost and found text and images inside the recently closed space, and is a response to urban structures, dislocation, touristic and local knowledge of independent spaces and culture in Taipei city.
■ Ruin Academy (廢墟建築學院), 2, Ln 85, Zhonghua Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市中華路一段85巷2號), tel: (02) 3393-7377. Admission: Free
■ Saturday from 6pm to 9pm
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
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
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s