The Museum of Broken Relationships (失戀博物館), winner of the 2011 Kenneth Hudson Award for most innovative European museum, has brought its show to Taipei for the summer. Founded by ex-lovers Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic, the Taipei version presents some 70 objects donated by the brokenhearted from across the globe, plus over 30 love mementos from locals. Every object is colored by personal experience, local culture and history, but each is a hologram of a universal human emotion.
■ Huashan 1914 Creative Park (華山1914文化創), 1, Bade Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市中正區八德路一段1號), tel: (02) 2358-1914, open daily from 9am to 6pm. General admission: NT$200
■ Until Sept. 1
Photo Courtesy of the Michael Ku Gallery
Chiang Iuan-hau’s (江元皓) solo exhibition Light Playground (光 遊戲場) is one microfilm and five computer animations about light. Running on loop in a pitch-black gallery, microfilm Cruises (遊輪) shows how the computer’s glowing screen can be a way for the user to see the world, yet be monitored at the same time. In Chiang’s digital works — three of which are collaborations with French choreographer Christian Rizzo — light is the leading character in scenes like a black forest, a roving car and a movie theater. Through the works, Chiang interprets light as a dominant phenomenon that changes human behavior and encourages obsession.
■ 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
■ Until August 18
Photo Courtesy of Kuan Hong Arts Management
Here to Where (這裡那裡) brings together 13 international artists including Yoshitomo Nara, Gary Baseman, Kwon Ki-Soo and Jang Tarng-kuh (張堂庫) who depict a fantasy world on canvas, paper and other media. Some, like Kwon’s pop-arty Dongguri who flies aircraft through grape and orange-colored skies, are purely playful pages seemingly out of a children’s book. Others, — such as Baseman’s Dying of Thirst (渴望而死), shown below— are cutesy landscapes that hide traces of a darker adult world.
■ 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
■ Opens Monday. Until Sept. 29
Photo Courtesy of the Metaphysical Art Gallery
In the solo exhibition Little Scenes (小場景), Shantel Liao (廖翊晴) presents 16 photographs of painstakingly crafted dolls in a world built with tiny tanks, trains and cathedrals. These black-and-white landscapes of military advances and street demonstrations are clearly unreal, but appear in details even finer than a true-to-life photograph.
■ 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, free admission
■ Opens today, reception tomorrow at 2:30pm. Until August 7
Metal-smith Nick Dong (董承濂) presents experiments with enamel in a new solo exhibition at the Michael Ku Gallery. Instead of throwing away his graphite sketches for metal sculptures, he melts enamel at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit and pours it onto the sketch to create a physical archive. The record is then fused to stainless steel and copper sculptures. “Sketching, for most artists, is the beginning of a process typically intended to generate a polished, finished artwork. Far more than arriving at an end result, I’ve been increasingly fascinated by the journey leading to it,” writes Dong in the gallery notes.
■ Michael Ku Gallery (谷公館), 4F-2, 21, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段21號4樓之2), tel: (02) 2577-5601. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 8pm
■ Until Sept. 8
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
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