Wade Wang (王善揚), a twenty-something from China’s Fujian Province, is on the other side of the Strait for the first time. So far, he has been to Eslite Bookstore to collect an award — a second-place finish for his digital animation about his father. He has also spent a day at an art exhibition in Songshan Cultural and Creative Park.
“I went in and thought the gallerists really cared about the works. It wasn’t even their own — they just came over to talk about it and shared their interpretation. [Taiwan’s] art culture seems quite rich,” he says.
For a designer working hard to make it, it’s a nice reprieve.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Time
“When I was little I wanted to become a great man like my father, a police officer. Ultimately I chose to do art, and then my other family members said, ‘You learn art, is that suitable?’ They worried. My father, though, supported me and didn’t place any pressures on me,” Wang says.
YOUNG DESIGNERS TODAY
Fathers and gallerists aside, the structural pressures on the modern young designer are strong and mostly unpleasant. There’s the growing need to know the business end, plus soaring education costs and a surplus of designers from degree programs vying for limited opportunities.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Times
Chanon Treenet, grand prize winner of the Taiwan International Student Design Competition, feels the pressures intensely.
“I could not stay in the UK after my graduation because I needed to apply for a visa. To get the visa, I could not do my style of experimental work. I would maybe have needed to apply for a job as a cartoon animator,” says Treenat, 27, a soft-spoken animator from Bangkok, who won the NT$400,000 grand prize.
“In Thailand, there is a market for my kind of work, but it is very small,” he says.
Phots: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
His film Neither Lit nor Dark and Wang’s Memories are currently on view at Eslite Bookstore on Dunhua Road, along with other winners of the Taiwan International Student Design Competition.
This year, the international jury awarded cash prizes to 37 designers under 30 in four categories — product design, visual design, digital animation and brand-specific design — plus one grand prize from any category.
As in previous years, winners have avoided political briar bushes and international society’s big flashpoints, working instead to solve uncontroversial problems like East Asia’s ageing population.
Photo: enru lin, Taipei times
There are products for seniors such as Easy Cut — a medicine bottle with its own pill-cutting device built into the cap — and Cyclecart, a grocery caddy that can be folded into a walker.
The gold medal in the product design category went to Taiwanese college seniors Lee Hsi-i (李思誼) and Tseng Yu-cheng (曾郁程) for their Balance Lever Seesaw Game (槓桿翹翹板遊戲) — a seesaw with an adjustable fulcrum. Its mission is bittersweet: allowing an only child to enjoy a seesaw with a portly parent, possibly his only playmate in a society with a declining birthrate.
Among the lot, Treenet’s Neither Lit Nor Dark is the rare design that barely makes an effort at being commercially viable.
“Many audiences watch it and tell me they do not understand,” he says. “Normally when people make animation they make cartoon animations. I tried to do something a little different.”
Neither Lit Nor Dark follows a boy as he walks home through dim alleys and ochre fields. There’s no narrative, only scenes, and the sound of the boy’s breathing puts the film in a weird place — he’s afraid of something, maybe a caged mouse that’s spinning alone in a wheel or a thundercloud releasing ribbons of black rain in the distance. With each step, the rasping accelerates and seeps out louder from the surround sound system, until you want to shut it off.
“I want the audience to feel fear. It’s horror animation,” Treenet says.
In Thailand, he’s trying to make ends meet, bouncing from commission to commission while aiming at art that is radical.
“I will put my funding into a longer film that I can show to people. Eventually, I hope to do work that is big,” he says.
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
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
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s