Peter Nelson brings video animation to Ming Dynasty scrolls at the Peter Nelson Solo Exhibition. In Extensions of a No-Place (Wen Zheng-ming), he shows a tiny digital man in a Wen Zheng-ming (文徵明) landscape painting, which is displayed across five separate screens and updated with Taipei’s architectural motifs. In another video work, Extensions of a No-Place (Qiu Ying), Nelson plays up the curiosities in Qiu Ying’s (仇英) painting of palace ladies, such as the spatial logic’s close relationship to Starcraft and the courtesan’s gender performativity in a cosmopolitan environment. These animations are the latest additions to Extensions of a No-Place, Nelson’s ongoing series of sculptures, sketches and video that make up an imaginary world.
■ Barry Room, Taipei Artist Village (台北國際藝術村百里廳), 7 Beiping E Rd, Taipei City (台北市北平東路7號), tel: (02) 3393-7377. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 9pm
■ Until June 16
Photo courtesy of the National Palace Museum
Ordinary Household (尋常人家) results from an interactive approach: Photographer Chen Chin-pao (陳敬寶) visited the homes of volunteers and asked what they did in their homes most often, what they wanted to do the most and what domestic event they would always remember. Subjects are photographed acting out their answers in the most familiar environment they know. Chen is best known for projects that hone in on the quotidian, including Betel Nut Girls, Circumgyration and Heaven on Earth, which was awarded the Higashikawa Award in 2011.
■ 1839 Contemporary Gallery (當代藝廊), 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. Free admission
■ Until June 30
Photo courtesy of Sing Art Gallery
From Mountains to the Sea: Taiwan Landscape (山海之間) opens tomorrow at Art Den (藝研齋), featuring oil paintings, watercolor and silkscreens of Taiwan landscapes by two artists. Chen Min-tse (陳敏澤) treats lavender fields and autumnal lakesides with her usual theatrical visual language, while May Chao (趙梅) minimizes lines and strokes, stripping the land of its darker features and making it appear light and simple, if only for a moment.
■ Art Den (藝研齋), 3F, 309 Xinyi Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市信義路四段309號3樓), tel: (02) 2325-8188. Open Tuesdays to Saturday from 10:30am to 6:30pm
■ Opens tomorrow. Until June 6
Photo courtesy of Sing Art Gallery
Renoir and Painters of the Twentieth Century is Taiwan’s first major exhibition themed on Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The National Palace Museum (NPM, 國立故宮博物院) brings together 65 works by Renoir and the artists he influenced, including Pablo Picasso, Henri-Emile-Benoit Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Raoul Dufy. Paintings are sourced from eleven museums in Japan, the US and France, and divided into six themes: ladies in hats; flowers; women; gardens and music; representations of the body; and southern France and the Mediterranean.
■ Library Building, National Palace Museum (國立故宮博物院圖書文獻大樓), 221 Zhishan Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市至善路二段221號), tel: (02) 2881-2021. Open daily from 9am to 5pm
■ Until Sept. 8
Photo courtesy of the Taipei Artist Village
A Countryside Record (田園紀事) is a sweetly impish interpretation of agrarian society by Chang Ho-min (張和民), a sculptor who works mostly with ceramics. Chang’s statuettes are farmers with absurd add-ons: one is riding a giant millipede, and another tills the soil as jumbo pearls of sweat stream from his brow.
■ Sing Art Gallery (新心藝術館), 67 Shengli Rd, Greater Tainan (台南市勝利路67號), tel: (06) 275-3957. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from noon to 8pm; closed Mondays and the second and fourth Sunday of every month
■ Opens tomorrow. Until June 30
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
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
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located