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
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