Infinity Dots is a retrospective of art by renowned Japanese painter Yayoi Kusama, whose work is inspired by the auditory and visual hallucinations she began experiencing as a young child. In Kusuma’s colorful creations, the Earth is just one of a million dots which are the “cells and molecules” of the universe. This show brings together paintings, sculptures and an installation mural composed of a celluloid doll army.
■ 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
■ Until Oct. 28
Photo courtesy of Mind Set Art Center
The 7th Annual Tagboat Award invited four jurors — Tomio Koyama from Tomio Koyama gallery, Shigeo Goto, organizer of Tokyo Front Line, Daisuke Miyatsu, professor at Kyoto University and Aki gallery owner Rick Wang — to select five promising young Japanese artists from a pool of over 380 participants. Winning works will be exhibited at Aki gallery next week. These include sculptures by Tomohiro Higashikag, who uses representations of animal heads to explore themes of life and death. Satoshi Aoki, creates very fine but irregular lines on Japanese paper with colored ink. Ayako Kato’s paintings explore the connection between people and the environment. Dogs represent different human personalities in the works of Kaori Ogishima. Hiroshi Mori, who already enjoys a following in Taiwan, examines instability in society with his work. Art by Toyo Horikawa and Tatsuya Kikuchi will also be on display.
■ 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
■ Sept. 19 to 30, reception on Sept. 22
Photo courtesy of Metaphysical Art Gallery
The Pervasive Space (前前後後 來來回回 流動的空間) features artist Emily Shih-chih Yang’s (楊世芝) collages. Though energetic, curvaceous lines and shapes in Yang’s artwork appear to be fluid brushstrokes, they are in fact made of many tiny bits of paper carefully pieced together. Every single scrap also has a message brushed onto it in tiny calligraphic strokes. Yang says each of her collages, made without any planning or sketches, capture all the emotions she feels as she allows each image to emerge organically.
■ 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
■ Until Oct. 13
Photo courtesy of IT Park Gallery
Advance tickets for the second annual Taiwan Photo (台灣攝影藝術博覽會) will be available starting tomorrow on the event’s Web site (www.taiwanphotofair.com). The exhibition, which will run from Oct. 5 to Oct. 10 at Xinyi District’s Shin Kong Mitsukoshi, brings together a mix of emerging and established photographers, galleries and studios in an intimate environment. This year’s special guests include Japan’s Photographer Hal and England’s Thomas Hodges. Advance tickets are available through Sept. 30 and are NT$120 each or NT$270 for an early bird package including an exhibition catalog. For more information in English and Chinese, visit: http://www.taiwanphotofair.com
Juin Shieh’s (謝鴻均) solo show From Single to Dual, From Dual to Single (一二‧二一) is a two-part retrospective of the artist’s work, following the development of her painting style over the last 15 years. Each of Shieh’s abstract canvases contain symbols that represent female characters in different novels, including the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.
■ Mind Set Art Center, 16-1, Xinsheng S Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市新生南路三段16-1號), tel: (02) 2365-6008. Tuesdays to Sunday 2pm to 6pm
■ Part 1 of the exhibition runs until Oct. 14. Part two starts on Oct. 19 and runs until Nov. 11
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