The Metaphysical Art Gallery (形而上畫廊) has got some nice marquee names at its new group exhibition, The Invisible Medium (看不見的中間). Korean pop artist Kwon Ki-soo is showing Dongguri, his grinning alter ego, balanced on a sugar cube in a silver river. Yoshitaka Amano, best known for his character designs for Final Fantasy, is here with “Deva Loka,” a paean to fast cars and American comic strips. The Invisible Medium features other artists for a total of 12 works, most of which are landscapes only thinly connected by the theme, “invisible medium,” or the boundary between insanity and sensibility.
■ Metaphysical Art Gallery (形而上畫廊), 7F, 219, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段219號7樓), tel: (02) 2711-0055. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 6:30pm
■ Until May 26
Photo Courtesy of Metaphysical Art Gallery
Tokyo-based Chie Murakami hails from a commercial photography background, so she may know a thing or two about how makeup can mature a girl instantly. The Japanese Girls photo exhibition, which opens at the 1839 Little Gallery (1839小藝廊) tomorrow, is her candid look at the tension behind girls made up like women. For every photograph, girls were groomed and coiffed to look far more polished than their 3 to 11-year-old selves. Yet there is invariably something small in each image — maybe an unsure hand, or a pout around the mouth — that complicates the visual finish. Born in Aihi, Japan, Murakami is a freelance photographer who studied in Tokyo under Kouichi Kamio, a commercial photographer.
■ 1839 Little Gallery (1839小藝廊), B1, 120 Yanji St, Taipei City (台北市延吉街120號B1), tel: (02) 2778-8458. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 8pm
■ Opening reception tomorrow at 3pm. Until May 26
Photo Courtesy of TKG+
Digital artist Su Yu-hsien’s (蘇育賢) enters sensitive territory with Hua-shan-qiang (花山牆), his first Tina Keng Gallery (耿畫廊) exhibition. In Hua-shan-qiang, Su uses over 20 digital works to explore the realities people craft when things go badly. The exhibit centerpiece — a house furnished with a video installation — probes death, specifically that of a self-immolated man. As guests to the house follow him into the afterworld, they must also confront their own fears and imagined realities.
■ TKG+, 15, Ln 548, Ruiguang Rd, Taipei City (台北市瑞光路548巷15號), tel: (02) 2659-0798. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 7pm
■ Opening reception tomorrow at 4:30pm. Until June 9
Photo Courtesy of Project Fulfill Art Space
Award-winning artist Chou Yu-cheng (周育正) gets nostalgic about his early days in Yi & C, a solo painting exhibition at the Project Fulfill Art Space (就在藝術空間). The Taipei-reared, Paris-trained Chou uses 12 pairs of paintings and a set called TEMCO to interrogate the relationship between private sponsors and art. Yi & C is about Chou himself, who as a fledgling artist once sold an entire studio of works in one go. “I can still remember to this day how I felt after returning to the studio ... [as] I turned to examine the first check I had received from selling works [on] my hands, a sense of sadness swelled up in me,” he said. But that’s not the end of Chou’s tale about artists and sponsors. Sometimes one agent lends the other meaning at Yi & C. Sometimes, their partnership itself becomes the artwork. Chou is winner of the 2012 Taipei Arts Awards and the 2011 Taishin Arts Awards.
■ Project Fulfill Art Space (就在藝術空間), 2, Alley 45, Ln 147, Xinyi Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市信義路三段147巷45弄2號), tel: (02) 2707-6942. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 1pm to 6pm
■ Until May 25
After 1949, the People’s Republic of China created People’s Parks, public spaces that were used for government-sponsored rallies and festivals. The 60-Minute Film: People’s Park (60分鐘影院:人民公園) is in Taipei until June 16, to tell how these little pieces of green became a nursery for the modern Chinese identity. The festival features four 60-minute video art works curated by Beijing’s Dong Bing-feng (董冰峰).
■ The Cube Project Space (立方計畫空間), 2F, 13, Alley 1, Ln 136, Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段136巷1弄13號2樓), tel: (02) 2368-9418. Open Wednesday to Sunday from 2pm to 8pm
■ Opening reception tomorrow at 2pm. Until June 16
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
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist