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
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