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
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
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