Jenny Chen’s (陳張莉) solo show Variations on the Tone Poets (詩韻) translates different kinds of music — ranging from the compositions of Schubert or Mozart to the operas of Wagner — into mixed media canvas paintings.
■ MOT Arts, 3F, 22, Fuxing S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市復興南路一段22號3樓), tel: (02) 2751-8088. Open daily from 11:30am to 8pm
■ Until Sept. 23
Photo courtesy of MOT Arts
MOCA Taipei’s Joint show Crush on EMU (心動 EMU) explores new models for art exhibitions. The placement of artworks in the space is an attempt to convert the gallery into a “corridor of time” that reflects the past decade in Taiwan and encourages audiences to engage with work by artists outside of the digital art circle.
■ 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
Photo courtesy of Main Trend Gallery
Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm. Admission to Arctic Diary is free. General admission: NT$50
■ Begins Saturday. Until Nov. 11
Fruitful Season (桃李時光) is sculptor Chang Tzu-lung’s (張子隆) response to Russian philosopher Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s statement that “art is life” and the increasing digitization of modern society. Chang uses his abstract ceramic sculptures to distill the female form down to its most basic elements.
■ Main Trend Gallery (大趨勢畫廊), 209-1, Chengde Rd Sec 3, Taipei City
(台北市承德路三段209-1號), tel: (02) 2587-3412. Open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until Oct. 6
The Chen Jin Art and Culture Award (陳進藝術文化獎) was launched in 1997 by late artist Chen Jin to provide scholarships for promising young painters. The awards’ 15th anniversary exhibition at the National Museum of History features art by 13 past honorees, who collaborated on 35 new works for the exhibition. Paintings by Chen are also displayed.
■ 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 Oct. 7
Wang Huai-qing’s (王懷慶) latest solo exhibition focuses on work created by the artist over the last five years. Wang uses a wide range of tools and materials, including printing presses, fiber and aluminum alloy. This show displays for the first time five of Wang’s tapestries, which experiment with texture and explore the intersection between fine art and home furnishings.
■ Tina Keng Gallery (耿畫廊), 15, Ln 548, Ruiguang Rd, Taipei City
(台北市瑞光路548巷15號), tel: (02) 2659-0798. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from
10am to 7pm
■ Until Sept. 23
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
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