Intersecting Vectors (斜面連結) is a test in thinking outside the box. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM, 台北市立美術館) invited three young curators to pull pieces from old collections for new conceptual art shows. Chin Ya-chun (秦雅君), Wang Yung-lin (王?琳) and Tsai Ming-jiun (蔡明君) present one galleried recombination each of paintings, videos, woodcut prints, linen art, site installations and other previously displayed pieces. Their exhibition includes six art tours in Mandarin Chinese, starting on Nov. 3. For details, visit www.tfam.museum.
■ TFAM, 181, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市中山北路三段181號), tel: (02) 2595-7656. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9:30am to 5:30pm and until 8:30pm on Saturdays. Admission: NT$30
■ Opens tomorrow. Until Feb. 16
Photo courtesy of Gallery 100
Chen Wei (陳蔚) paints old clothes, small animals, withered plants and other minutiae of life. At the solo show See You Somewhere Sometime (未竟之地 十月), the objects look bruised and desolate on the canvas, with outlines obscured. For the artist, they are points of meditation for remembering the past and detaching from the present. Chen was inspired by Marcel Proust’s stream-of-consciousness novel Time Regained — the seventh volume in his monumental In Search of Lost Time — in which insignificant objects allow the protagonist to relive bygone incidents.
■ Gallery 100 (百藝畫廊), 1F, 13, Ln 252, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段252巷13號1樓), tel: (02) 2731-0876. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until Nov. 17
Photo courtesy of Asia Art Center
Taitung native Pan Hsin-hua (潘信華) uses traditional ink painting techniques to depict contemporary lifestyles in Taiwan, producing vintage yet surreal works that critic Philip Chao-jen Wu (吳超然) has called “never seen before in Chinese contemporary ink painting.” Recent works on view at his solo exhibition Gaze Into Illusions (觀幻) are luxuriant countryside landscapes featuring the adventures of two boys.
■ Asia Art Center II (亞洲藝術中心二館), 93 Lequn 2nd Road, Taipei City (台北市樂群二路93號), tel: (02) 8502-7939. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6:30pm
■ Until Nov. 17
Tangible Splendor (光華可賞) is an introduction to mother-of-pearl ornamentation in traditional lacquer ware. Mother-of-pearl is the lustrous substance harvested from the inside of shells. As early as the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE) dynasty, artists cut mother-of-pearl into pieces and arranged them on wet lacquer to form patterns and scenes. In the 14th century, maritime trade brought mother-of-pearl techniques to the Ryukyu Islands and Southeast Asia. The National Museum of History (國立歷史博物館) is showing 51 mother-of-pearl antiques that trace the technique’s evolution across history.
■ National Museum of History, 49 Nanhai
Rd, Taipei City (台北市南海路49號), tel: (02) 2361-0270. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm. General admission: NT$30
■ Until Nov. 24
Huang Ko-wei (黃可維) uses thick and unbridled brush strokes to paint death, namely the carcasses of birds. The results, displayed at solo show Irrational Number (無理數), are idealized forms that draw attention to the difference between seeing and truly facing the end of life, as well as the distinction between a reproduction and an original.
■ VT Artsalon (非常廟藝文空間), B1, 17, Ln 56, Xinsheng N Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市新生北路三段56巷17號B1), tel: (02) 2597-2525. Open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 1:30pm to 9pm
■ Until Nov. 19
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
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would