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
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s