Ju Ming (朱銘) returns to Kalos Gallery with Citizen (市民), a series of 80 human-scale wood sculptures that form part of the Living World Series (人間木雕系列), a long-term art project begun in 1981 that has as its focus the people and society of Taiwan. The exhibition portrays ordinary city dwellers from all walks of life. The unpainted and rough-textured sculptures express the diversity of humanity and, in their majestic grandeur, suggest the extraordinary aspects of ordinary people in everyday life.
■ Kalos Gallery (真善美畫廊), 269, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段269號). Open daily from 10am to 6:30pm, closed Sundays. Tel: (02) 2836-3452
■ Until Feb. 8
Orientations (方向) showcases new and old paintings by Jorinde Jankowski (張友鷦), whose canvases vary in subject matter and style. In her vaguely monochromatic cityscapes, she depicts the isolation and fragmentation of urban life, delineating an all too common alienation as a symbol for human longing. In other paintings, she employs a vibrant palette of color and cartoon-like, personified animal figures to mock human flaws, while in other canvases she becomes more introspective and investigates the meaning of home, family and belonging with fairytale-like images that possess dark undertones.
■ 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
■ Until Jan. 19
Contemporary Chinese artist, Shi Jinsong (史金淞), works in sculpture, painting, and on-site experiential performance, and uses non-traditional easel-painting forms to express his concern for the transitory nature of life and its objects. With Scenes from an Unpredictable Theatre, Shi uses theatrical elements as the artistic medium for his new exhibition, which is in two parts. The first involved Shi traveling throughout Taiwan over the past few months, collecting everyday objects and returning them to the gallery, where an invited audience was encouraged to smash them using a variety of hammers. The artist will, over the coming weeks, use the detritus — what he dubs “a script” — to form an installation, which he calls “a play,” which will be on view in the gallery until May.
■ 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 May 26
Experimental sound installations and live performances make up a solo exhibition by Chang Yung-ta (感知‧交界). Entitled Seen/Unseen (張永達), Chang transforms invisible signals and data — radiation from a nuclear power plant, for example — into sound waves, which serve as the primary objects of his installations. The two pieces present the conversion of visible things to invisible sounds, or the conversion of something visual into something auditory, which is meant to convey a looming yet silent message.
■ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (關渡美術館), Taipei National University of the Arts (台北藝術大學), 1 Xueyuan Rd, Taipei City (台北市學園路1號). Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 5pm. Tel: (02) 2896-1000 X2432
■ Until Feb. 24
Huang Pei-ju (黃珮如) continues her exploration of light and darkness as a metaphor of liminality with Reduced to Light (躲進光裡面). Huang uses pen to create various wash effects on the canvas, which are meant to suggest a visible contour to light.
■ IT Park Gallery (伊通公園), 2F-3F, 41 Yitong St, Taipei City (台北市伊通街41號2-3樓). Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 1pm to 10pm. Tel: (02) 2507-7243
■ Until Jan. 26
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