The Tamsui Historical Museum (淡水古蹟博物館) is hosting a retrospective on William Morris, a 19th-century polymath most famous for his wallpapers. Morris sought to bring art to every home via handmade nature-inspired wallpaper such as Trellis — based on a rose trellis by his home in Kent — and Pomegranate, which featured stylized yet subdued versions of the fruit. Everlasting Vision of William Morris (不朽的追求), a yearlong show, presents his most enduring designs for wallpapers, as well as works in other media. One gallery focuses on his innovations with furniture; another introduces his campaigns to preserve historical buildings. There’s a showcase dedicated to Kelmscott Press, his publishing house in London. Morris prized workmanship and oversaw each step from bookbinding to paper selection to the design of typography, hand-pressing just 53 titles between 1891 and 1989. For more information, visit www.arthappening.org/williammorris/
■ Tamsui Historical Museum at Fort San Domingo (淡水紅毛城), 1, Ln 28, Zhongzheng Rd, New Taipei City (新北市中正路28巷1號), tel: (02) 2623-1001. Open Mondays to Fridays from 9:30am to 5pm, Saturdays and Sundays from 9:30am to 6pm, closed the first Monday of every month, free admission
■ Until Oct. 31
Photo courtesy of NTMOFA
The Form and Color of Fire (火的形與色) features ceramics by five major artists: Hans Hartung, Manfredo Borsi, Kim En Joong and Wu A-sun (吳炫三) and Pablo Picasso, who had a little-known love for ceramics. Picasso preferred ceramic materials that were atypical for his time, such as white earthenware that he left unglazed. Unlike his paintings, which are often dark and foreboding, his ceramics are impish depictions of happy times, goats, owls and other creatures. For more information, visit www.exhibition.ceramics.ntpc.gov.tw/theformandcoloroffire
■ Yingge Ceramics Museum (鶯歌陶瓷博物館), 200 Wenhua Rd, New Taipei City (新北市文化路200號), tel: (02) 8677-2727, open Mondays to Fridays from 9:30am to 5pm, Saturdays and Sundays from 9:30am to 6pm, closed first Monday of the month
■ Until April 20
Photo courtesy of National Taitung Living Arts Center
Spotlight on Taitung (看見臺東) brings together prizewinning photos of Formosa Press Magazine’s photo contest themed on Taitung County. Now in its third year, the contest received 3,002 entries from photographers across 20 cities and counties. Top honors this year went to Kao Hsing-tsung (高信宗) for his image of exploding fireworks shrouding a man at the iconic Lord Handan (寒單爺) festival.
■ National Taitung Living Arts Center (國立臺東生活美學館 ), 254 Datung Rd, Taitung City (臺東市大同路254號), tel: (089) 322-248, open daily from 8:30am to 5pm
■ Until March 5
Chen Yun’s (陳云) One Piece Room is about the imaginary friends of her childhood, a lonely period marked by her mother’s death when she was nine. Chen’s father, an installation artist, had stored joss paper, photos, antiques and other curios in the house, and she developed friendships with the people she believed lived inside in the objects — unhappy people who had reasons to end their own lives. The concept of Chen’s exhibition is a memorial: Tiny dolls are housed in clear boxes shaped like a greenhouse, each with a marker that clinically explains the reasons and ways they committed suicide. Chen’s collection of dead dolls, who are mostly children, act as emblem of a young person’s pain that’s only slowly being shed on the path to adulthood.
■ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (關渡美術館), 1 Xueyuan Rd, Taipei City (台北市學園路1號), tel: (02) 2893-8870. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 5pm
■ Until April 27
The Changing World (世界在變) is a solo show about Fifth Moon Group (五月畫會) cofounder Kuo Tong-jong (郭東榮). Born in 1927, Kuo studied art at the National Taiwan Normal University and went on to found Taiwan’s main modern art society of the 1960s. On canvas, he has treated current events like the Hiroshima bombing, the US Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and domestic affairs including urban renewal. The exhibition assembles Kuo’s representative paintings, as well as private manuscripts that document his creative process.
■ National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMOFA, 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 May 18
Contemporary artist Noritoshi Hirakawa thinks of man as two beings, one private and one public, with the former constantly censoring the expression of the latter. At the solo exhibition Infinite Dance, he is showing Lei Lenka — Yuriko, a video work that directs attention to the meaningless gestures and unspoken desires that inhabit that all private selves have in common. He also brings his S series: photos of beautiful landscapes in Switzerland that are also the sites of grotesque news-making suicide.
■ Chi-Wen Gallery (其玟畫廊), 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 Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until March 29
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
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