The 2013 Asian Art Biennial Everyday Life (返常) features paintings, photography, video, sculptures and other works that comment on what it’s like to live in the Asia-Pacific, says curator Iris Shu-ping Huang (黃舒屏). Some 40 artists were chosen from Taiwan and abroad. Taipei-based painter Chiu Chien-Jen (邱建仁) brings urban scenes with bleak but mild titles — Heading Up as Before and Nothing Happened So Far — inhabited by alien-like people. Richard Bell is here with his Broken English, a film that tries to find out why Australian Aborigines appear to lack a vision for their future. The biennial also includes symposiums and lectures by guest scholars.
■ National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (國立臺灣美術館), 2, Wuquan W Rd Sec 1, Greater Taichung (台中市西區五權西路一段2號) tel: (04) 2372-3552. Open Tuesdays to Fridays from 9am to 5pm, Saturdays and Sundays from 9am to 6pm
■ Until Jan. 5
Photo courtesy of MOCA
Lurking Waves (伏噪) is a themed exhibition about Taiwan’s noise scene, presented through artifacts collected by founding member Wang Fu-jui (王福瑞). On show are objects dating to the scene’s inception in the ‘90s: Wang’s letters with overseas artists, seminal performances, cassette tapes and other low-tech media from Noise, Taiwan’s first experimental music label, which Wang founded in 1993.
■ TheCube Project Space (立方計畫空間), 2F, 13, Alley 1, Ln 136, Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段136巷1弄13號2樓), tel: (02) 2368-9418. Open Wednesdays to Sundays from 2pm to 8pm
■ Until Dec. 8
Photo courtesy of Chi-Wen Gallery
At the Museum of Contemporary Art, another Wang Fu-jui (王福瑞) solo exhibition draws attention to the noise native to cities. Hyper Transmission (超傳波) features two installation works. Parallel Waves (平行波) consists of eight ultrasonic speakers that can broadcast pre-recorded sounds of electromagnetic radiation, a reality of city life that affects its denizens intimately, yet its sound normally lies just beyond human hearing range. Another installation, Murmur (呢喃), is a large interactive chip-controlled toy. Users press buttons to recreate the ringing, buzzing and other noises that their technology uses to hail them every day.
■ MOCA Studio, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA, Taipei), 39 Changan W Rd, Taipei City (台北市長安西路39號), tel: (02) 2552-3720. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm. Admission: Free.
■ Until Nov. 3
Lee Hui-fan (李惠芳) holds her largest solo exhibition in years, bringing over a hundred oil paintings — some never-before-seen — that were created between 1986 and 2013. Lee, a Taipei-trained painter who made a career in Paris and the US, has been hailed as the Chardin of the East by critic Wang Tze-hsiung (王哲雄). Her works are western-style still life portraits of animals, people and local domestic objects like ancestral alters.
■ Chung Shan National Gallery (中山國家畫廊) at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (國立國父紀念館), 505, Renai Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (臺北市信義區仁愛路4段505號), tel: (02) 2758-8008 ext. 542. Open daily from noon to 8 pm
■ Until Oct. 27
Ibrahim Miranda imagines a different kind of Cuba with Reminiscence of the Island (孤島之夜), a solo exhibition of scrolls. Miranda, a Cuba native, bases his mixed media works on actual maps, covering them with his own cartography and symbols to evince long-gone Cubas, or Cubas that could have been if the history of the troubled island nation had turned out differently.
■ Chi-Wen Gallery, 3F, 19, Ln 252, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段252巷19號3樓), tel: (02) 8771-3372. Open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 11am to 7pm. On the Net: www.chiwengallery.com
■ Until Oct. 26
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