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
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
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
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