Heart of Nature (自然心) is a retrospective exhibition of oil paintings by Chang Wen-rong (張文榮). Chang’s landscape paintings are strong on earthy reds, greens, yellows and blues so as to evoke a simpler era. The paintings convey tranquil scenes derived from his life experiences, including fields and forests, flowers, waterfalls, rocks and gullies.
■ Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, 80 Meishuguan Rd, Greater Kaohsiung (高雄市美術館路80號), tel: (07) 555-0331. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9am to 5pm. Admission: Free
■ Until May 19
Pphoto Courtesy of KMOFA
Riverbed 1968 (河床1968) is a limited retrospective exhibition on the long and multi-directional career of Hsieh Chun-te (謝春德). There will be a limited number of photographs on view, as well as a recent video installation.
■ Chi-Wen Gallery (其玟畫廊), 3F, 19, Ln 252, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段252巷19號3樓), tel: (02) 8771-3372. Open Tuesdays through Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until May 4
Photo Courtesy of Mind Set Art Center
Chinese sculptor Yu Ji (于吉) presents new sculptures made from wax, stone, lime and paper with In the Skin (切膚). Yu’s work ponders the history of figurative sculpture, particularly the human form, and how it is presented in the gallery space. Recalling ancient sculpture, which today retains its power for us due to its antiquity even though parts may have broken off over time. Yu intentionally ignores details and makes a fragmentary body, which serves as her own statement of history, and how we try to imagine the absent as present. The artist has been engaged in an on-site art-making project since she arrived in Taipei earlier this month, one which she’ll unveil at the opening reception tomorrow from 3:30pm to 5:30pm. Using the materials she has collected in Taipei, Yu says, she hopes to produce several works based on her own interaction with the environment and local residents.
■ 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
■ Opening reception tomorrow at 3:30pm
Photo Courtesy of Nou Gallery
Unveiled: Restoring the Permanent Collection (隱藏的真實:典藏品修復展) is a retrospective exhibition presenting major works restored from the museum’s permanent collection. In addition to exhibiting these restored oil, ink, gouache and paper-based works for the first time, the museum has included images of the restoration process in order to create a dialogue between the hidden and real. By presenting unexpected discoveries such as unique mountings and materials, signatures and paintings within paintings — much of which is made possible by x-ray, infrared, ultraviolet, compositional analysis, and visible light spectrography — the viewer can further understand the artwork and the artists who made them. The exhibition venue is divided into four areas entitled Visible and Invisible, Science and Dialogue, Remembering History and Reappearing Art, and also includes a screening area where films related to the museum’s restoration work are shown.
■ 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
■ Until June 2
Dreamy Reality (如夢) presents the paintings of Chinese artist Zhou Jinhua (周金華). Zhou’s paintings interweave two radically different perspectives: aerial photography and traditional Chinese painting. On these large-scale canvases, Zhou depicts people from an unusual height, though never as a unified mass. Those depicted seem to follow their own path, only sometimes coming together in twos and threes to enact multiple small dramas. For Zhou, the perspective is necessary for him to create his paintings. As he once said in an interview: “The bird’s-eye perspective is not a position of power. I need distance to understand what’s going on.”
■ Nou Gallery (新畫廊), 232, Renai Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市仁愛路四段232號), tel: (02) 2700-0239. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until April 24
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