Last year, Isa Ho (何孟娟) and Germany’s Moritz Partenheimer photographed their neighbors and their neighbors’ belongings at Westbeth Artist Housing of New York City. The results are juxtaposed at joint exhibition Westbeth (魏斯貝絲) in Taipei. Ho takes a non-traditional approach to portraiture, shrinking the human subject so it is as minor as a houseplant, then photoshopping a host of ghostly objects into the image so that each photo is a record of desire, time and other extra-contextual signifiers. Partenheimer’s series is softly-lit images of cropped furniture, sections of wall and decor, each arranged to demand notice as a clue about their owner.
■ VT Art Salon (非常廟藝文空間), B1, 17, Ln 56, Xinsheng 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 Fridays from 11:30am to 7pm, Saturdays from 1:30pm to 9pm, closed Sundays and Mondays
■ Opens Wednesday. Until June 14
Photo Courtesy of the Turkish Trade Office in Taipei
Wanted Dean-E Mei: A Retrospective (尋梅啟事) is the first comprehensive retrospective for Dean-E Mei (梅丁衍). Born in Taipei in 1954, Mei is an influential avant-garde artist known for pieces like The Glisten of Taiwan (台灣之光), a rice wine advertisement that riffs on a catchphrase and alludes to the marketing strategies behind nationalism. This retrospective is exhaustive, bringing together hundreds of oils, watercolors, prints, giclee prints, ready-mades and large scale installations dating from 1976 to the present. Media illustrate the evolution of his work, from student pieces made in New York to the acerbic digitally-achieved art that he creates today in response to Taiwan’s political quandaries.
■ Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 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 August 17
Photo Courtesy of TFAM
At Scenes From Turkey (土耳其風情話), acclaimed landscape artist Isil Ozisik is showing 60 watercolors on paper canvas handmade at Puli Paper (埔里紙廠) in Nantou County. Born in 1939, Ozisik works from his native Turkey as well as abroad and is grand prize winner of the 2002 Art League’s American Landscape award. His latest paintings are precise and picturesque landscapes of Turkey, mainly of Istanbul.
■ De-ming Gallery (德明藝廊) at the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall (國父紀念館), 505, Renai Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市仁愛路4段505號), tel: (02) 2757-6407, ext. 13. Open daily from 9am to 6pm
■ Until May 29
Same but Different (同中有異) features Franz Bette, winner of the De Beers Diamond International Award, regarded as the Oscars of the jewelry industry. The German artist is showing new jewelry made in Hong Kong during a recent tenure as design professor. Bette, whose early work favors spheres and polished gold, presents a jarring and intense collection of rings topped with mesh, accessories of paper-wrapped steel and brooches that resemble a bundle of long safety pins.
■ National Taiwan Museum (臺博館本館), 2, Xiangyang Rd, Taipei City (臺北市襄陽路2號), tel: (02) 2382-2566. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9:30am to 5pm, closed on Mondays
■ Until June 15
South East Asia Topology: Chapter 1 (南洋拓樸) is a group show of three Southeast Asian artists who deal with their countries’ turbulent past of colonialism and foreign intervention. In a 3D animation and installation, Dinh Q. Le raises questions about Vietnamese nationalism, while Jompet Kuswidananto debuts a work that draws viewers into the chaos in Indonesia after the fall of President Soeharto in 1998. Sutthirat Supaparinya’s My Grandfather’s Route Has Been Forever Blocked is a two-channel video work documenting her trip along the Ping River. Now blocked, Ping River was once a vital trade route in Thailand, but was set aside during the transition of regimes.
■ Project Fulfill Art Space (就在藝術空間), 2, Alley 45, Ln 147, Xinyi Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市信義路三段147巷45弄2號), tel: (02) 2707-6942. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 1pm to 7pm
■ Until June 1
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