For four years, Taiwanese artist Chen Chun-hao (陳浚豪) has been honing the art of mosquito-nail composition. Using a modified nail gun, he inserts the long slender pins on paintings, grouping them and arranging their height with a pointillist’s precision. His latest works are on view now at Reclaiming the Lost Territories (還我河山). Chen has “reclaimed” classic Chinese ink paintings that fell into political disfavor during the Qing Dynasty, by reproducing them as enormous pin-screen pieces.
■ Tina Keng Gallery (耿畫廊), 15, Ln 548, Ruiguang Rd, Taipei (台北市瑞光路548巷15號), tel: (02) 2659-0798. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 7pm
■ Opens tomorrow. Until Jan. 26
Photo courtesy of Eslite Gallery
10 Years in Europe (第一個十年) features photographs taken by Simon Chang (張雍) when he lived in Slovenia, Austria and other parts of Europe between 2003 and 2013. This period was a happy reprieve from Taiwan, where he had “lived as a number, not a name,” Chang writes in the gallery notes, referring to the numbers used to identify conscripts in Taiwan’s army and students in the public-school system. At his solo exhibition, the photographs are numbered and ordered chronologically. Within each frame, Chang has tried to compose an unquantifiable human emotion or condition.
■ Soka Art Center (索卡藝術中心), 2F, 57, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei (台北市敦化南路一段57號2樓), tel: (02) 2570-0390. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 9pm
■ Until Feb. 16
Chen I-hsuen (陳以軒) pulls together a range of media for his first solo show Nessun Dorma ( 你是懂了嘛), a study of person-to-person communication. In an opera work titled Nessun Dorma, Chen sings a famous Italian aria with enough zest to mask its nonsense Chinese-language lyrics, in a reminder that what we say greatly depends on how we say it. For a video work titled I Know, Chen films the faces of friends as he divulges actual secrets about himself. Onscreen, the friends’ rapt focus and other expressions serve as a kind of spiritual pornography that satisfies the viewer’s desire to be understood.
■ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (關渡美術館), 1 Xueyuan Rd, Taipei (台北市學園路1號), tel: (02) 2893-8870. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 5pm
■ Until Feb. 23
At solo show Dreams for Sale (夢想大拍賣), Benrei Huang (黃本蕊) presents acrylic paintings of a prominently whiskered rabbit named Nini (尼尼). Each work is a colorful picture-story featuring Nini in a familiar situation, be it scheming with dwarf rabbits in Partisanship (政黨生涯) or peering out wistfully by a clock in 9-5 Syndrome (上班族徵候群).
■ Eslite Gallery (誠品畫廊), 5F, 11 Songgao Rd, Taipei (台北市松高路11號5樓), tel: (02) 8789-3388 X1588. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until Jan. 26
At last year’s Venice Biennale, Taiwan’s Vincent J.F. Huang (黃瑞芳) brought his installations to the pavilion of Tuvalu — a Polynesian island nation that named him as their official representative artist. In Taipei, Huang is staging the sequel to his Venice show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Destiny Intertwined — A Dialogue between Vincent J.F. Huang and Tuvalu (命運‧交織─黃瑞芳與吐瓦魯的對話) brings together works originally shown in Venice, along with recent installations that direct attention to the sea-level rise induced by climate change.
■ MOCA Studio, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA, Taipei), 39 Changan W Rd, Taipei (台北市長安西路39號), tel: (02) 2552-3720. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm
■ Until Feb. 29
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and