Hungry? You might not be after you witness seafood coming back to life at Taipei’s Digital Art Center, a gallery that specializes in new media art. Aushin Chang (張顥馨) and Wang Ding-yeh (王鼎曄) use electrical currents to make dead fish “dance” to popular KTV numbers in the Live Live Seafood (生猛海產店). Complementing the “live” works are static displays, including shears, fillet knives, fish cutting tables, as well as diagrams that try to parse the difference between life and lifelike electrical activity. Also opening tomorrow is Loh Li-Chen’s (駱麗真) Ubiquitous (幸無在中央), a digital installation about what makes people happy. Spoiler alert: There are no right answers. Using lighting, images, sound and video, Loh wants to start a conversation about what’s gained and what’s lost when values start becoming centralized.
■ Digital Art Center (台北數位藝術中心), 180 Fuhua Rd, Taipei City (台北市福華路180號), tel: (02) 7736-0708. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm
■ Opening reception tomorrow at 3pm. Until June 16
Photo courtesy of Digital Art Center
Kalos Gallery’s (真善美畫廊) Dunhua location is showing Memory Garden (記憶花園), a themed exhibition of paintings and sculptures by two artists. The works are inspired by natural materials — Yu Wen-fu (游文富) draws on the feather while Chu Fang-yi (朱芳毅) uses mud — to create works that feel like polar opposites, respectively light and heavy.
■ Kalos Gallery (真善美畫廊), 269, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段269號), tel: (02) 2706-9610. Open Mondays to Saturdays 10am to 6:30pm
■ Opening reception tomorrow at 3pm. Until June 8
Photo courtesy of TIVAC
Home (家), by photographer Wang Wen-yi (王文毅), opens tomorrow at the Taiwan International Visual Arts Center (TIVAC, 台灣國際視覺藝術中心). Taken at an orphanage in Siem Reap, Cambodia, Home tries not to be just portraits of children, but also of the different relationships they have formed in the only home that they know. Perhaps inadvertently, the photos also show the psychological and material distance between the photographer and his subjects. “With these shots, it wasn’t only about getting the best composition. It was also about working out camera positions that were mutually comfortable,” Wang writes in his gallery notes.
■ Taiwan International Visual Arts Center (TIVAC, 台灣國際視覺藝術中心), 16, Alley 52, Ln 12, 16 Bade Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市松山區八德路三段12巷52弄16號), tel: (02) 2577-1781. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11:30am to 7pm
■ Opens tomorrow. Until May 26
Photo courtesy of Aki Gallery
After a two-year hiatus, painter Fan Yang-tsung (范揚宗) is back at the Aki Gallery (也趣藝廊) with Under 38°C (38度西下的微熱肌膚), his take on the modern-day pool party. Fan presents the pool party as an exciting bundle of impulses that are public and private, forceful and genial, voyeuristic and exhibitionist. He also shows all the minutiae — the tan lines, the bubbles, the water flow where swimmers are cutting through — using his signature clown-bold colors.
■ Aki Gallery (也趣藝廊), 141 Minzu W Rd, Taipei City (台北市民族西路141號), tel: (02) 2599-1171. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from noon to 6:30pm
■ Until May 26
Tomorrow Jason Chi (紀嘉華) debuts Rhythm of Light (光的節奏), a solo exhibition of oil paintings that render emotions in measured geometric shapes and recurring colors, particularly canary yellow.
■ Ever Harvest Art Gallery (日升月鴻畫廊), 2F, 107, Renai Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市仁愛路四段107號2樓), tel: (02) 2752-2353. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 6:30pm
■ Opening reception tomorrow at 3pm. 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
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
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