With over 15 million motor scooters licensed as of March, Taiwan is the most scooter-dense country in the world. Scooters in Taipei: Chien Hsin-chan Solo Exhibition (機車台北—簡信昌攝影個展) is a look at scooters in Taiwan’s capital city. Chien Hsin-chan(簡信昌), who programs software at a Top 500 company, was a finalist in the 2011 TIVAC Young Photographer Award (2011 TIVAC攝影新人獎) with his black-and-white snapshots of scooters. Since 2011, Chien has extended the series with more shots taken from the back of his own scooter. “I could only shoot when the traffic lights permitted, and due to the limited time, often I could not get the right composition, or I sometimes lost the chance altogether,” said Chien in his gallery notes. His results are rare and fleeting moments in life spans of these ubiquitous utilities, for instance a mother with a toddler lolling precariously off to the side, deep in sleep.
■ 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
■ Until June 16
Photo courtesy of IT Park Gallery
Lucid Dreaming: A Solo Exhibition by Yu Liao-chi (清明夢—廖祈羽個展) are single-channel videos that create the illusion of lucid dreaming for the viewer. Works use pedestrian but indispensable events, like eating, to activate the templates of a viewer’s memory. At the same time, looping cotton-candy colored scenes are embedded with surreal, thrilling and sometimes terrifying moments, like a calm attacker with a blood-orange tomato and a knife, to force viewers to move beyond their known experience and to freely confront their fears, much in the way that a dreamer must during lucid dreaming.
■ IT Park Gallery (伊通公園), 2F, 41 Yitong St, Taipei City (台北市伊通街41號2樓), tel: (02) 2507-7243. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 1pm to 10pm
■ Until June 22
Photo courtesy of the National Taiwan Museum
Paper art gets an update at Roaming Light: The Fantasy World on Paper at the Suho Memorial Paper Culture Foundation. Guest artists are Wandering Cloud (行雲朵朵), a three-piece ensemble best-known for using animation and kinetic tools to provoke viewer interaction. For this exhibit, they were asked to apply their concept and technologies to the primitive medium of paper.
■ Suho Memorial Paper Foundation (樹火紀念紙文化基金會), 68, Changan E Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市長安東路二段68號), tel: (02) 2507-5535 ext. 19. Open Mondays to Saturdays from 9:30am to 4:30pm
■ Until Sept. 7
Photo courtesy of Pedro Tseng
Qipao: Memory, Modernity and Fashion tells the story of an enduring piece of Chinese fashion, the qipao. The National Taiwan Museum brings together 144 antique dresses from private collectors and the Fu Jen Catholic University, and organized under five themes: Women’s Qipao Tales, the Bridal Qipao Collection, Three Generations of Women, Beauty is in the Details and A Century of Qipao Evolution. The exhibition also features a “fitting room” where visitors can dress up in virtual qipaos, plus 20th century paintings depicting how the garment was styled across Taiwan’s history.
■ National Taiwan Museum (國立臺灣博物館), 2 Xiangyang Rd, Zhongzheng Dist, Taipei City (臺北市中正區100襄陽路2號), tel: 02-2382-2566. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9:30am to 5pm
■ Until Nov. 10
Releasing from Life & Paradigm — Ying-yu Lin Solo Exhibition (放.生.大.典-林英玉個展) is an outdoor sculpture garden populated with human mutants. Artist Lin Ying-yu (林英玉) thinks of them as ambassadors of a place that’s purer, younger and perhaps happier. One humanoid, an alabaster beauty with a headful of spinning neon lights, shows off its figure in a wanton disregard of reason and utilitarianism. The Tetrapod Goddess (消波女神), a response to the devastation of Typhoon Morakot, are eight voluptuous humanoids that bless the earth and guard against evil. Indoors at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lin is also showing 12 giant carnivalesque paintings that illustrate the world from which his sculptures come.
■ Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA, Taipei), 39 Changan W Rd, Taipei City (台北市長安西路39號), tel: (02) 2552-3721. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm. Free admission
■ Until July 7
Pedro Tseng (曾長生) is a retired diplomat who launched second and third careers as an art professor and painter. His Digital Aura series, a 10-year project that goes on show tomorrow, are paintings of contemporary living spaces in Taiwan. Tseng mixes Cubist, Surrealist and Fauvist techniques to build the illusion of cold light on canvas — a digital and ghostly effect that makes a statement about how society views space today.
■ Capital Art Center (首都藝術中心), 2F, 343, Renai Rd Sec 4, Daan District (台北市仁愛路四段343號2樓), tel: (02) 2775-5268.
■ Opening reception tomorrow at 3pm. Until July 6
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
In the aftermath of the 2020 general elections the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had crushed them in a second landslide in a row, with their presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) winning more votes than any in Taiwan’s history. The KMT did pick up three legislative seats, but the DPP retained an outright majority. To take responsibility for that catastrophic loss, as is customary, party chairman Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) resigned. This would mark the end of an era of how the party operated and the beginning of a new effort at reform, first under