Larry Shao (邵樂人) employs salsa — the sauce, the dance, the lifestyle — as the theme for six “social and cultural interventions” with Esto Es Salsa (騷莎就是醬). It includes The Blurring of Salsa and Life, eight interviews with people on their relationship with salsa dancing, Esto Es Salsa, a performance exploring food, rhythm and sex and The World’s First Nachata, which probes the cultural similarities between Taiwan and the Dominican Republic.
■ IT Park Gallery (伊通公園), 41 Yitong St, Taipei City (台北市伊通街41號), tel: (02) 2507-7243. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 1pm to 10pm
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 7pm. Until Aug. 4
Photo Courtesy of TFAM
A Vision Across Boundaries (跨渡縱目) is a group exhibition of photography by Tsao Liang-pin (曹良賓, Taiwan), Liao Yijun (廖逸君, China), Ahn Jun (South Korea) and Yojiro Imasaka (Japan). Though their genres differ — documentary, interiors and cityscapes — the photographers are united in the depiction of the US as their primary subject.
■ VT Art Salon (非常廟藝文空間), B1, 47 Yitong St, Taipei City (台北市伊通街47號B1), tel: (02) 2516-1060. Open Tuesdays through Thursdays from 1:30pm to 9pm, and Fridays and Saturdays from 1:30pm to 10pm
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 7pm. Until Aug. 4
Formless Form (非形之形) features 70 works by more than 30 Taiwanese artists working in the genre of abstract art, beginning from the 1960s. According to the museum press release, abstract art “pours out subjective, rich emotions onto the canvas, even opening up the possibility of unearthing an artistic language from within the subconscious.”
■ Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM, 台北市立美術館), 181, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市中山北路三段181號), tel: (02) 2595-7656. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9:30am to 5:30pm and until 8:30pm on Saturdays. Admission: NT$30
■ Begins Saturday. Until Sept. 2
The USSR Art Series — Socialist Realist Painting (蘇聯藝術大系 — 社會現實主義繪畫) brings together a series of socialist realist paintings by masters of the genre such as Vasily Surikov, Valentin Serov, Isaac Levitan and Vassily Maximov.
■ 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
■ Until Aug. 8
Israeli video artist Yael Bartana blurs fact and fiction in … And Europe will be Stunned, a film trilogy that the artist hopes will “wake the ghosts of history.” The films follow the creation and flourishing of a fictional organization, The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, which serves to examine totalitarian societies up to and following World War II.
■ TheCube Project Space (立方計畫空間), 2F, 13, Alley 1, Ln 136, Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段136巷1弄13號2樓), tel: (02) 2368-9418. Open Tuesdays through Sundays from 12pm to 7pm
■ Until Aug. 5
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and