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
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50