Sacred Sojourn (藏地轉行) is an exhibition of three high-resolution videos that Jawshing Arthur Liou (劉肇興) created after his daughter’s death. In mourning, Liou embarked on a 2,300km expedition from Lhasa to the Tibetan Plateau and on to Mount Everest and Mount Kailash. The works that have come out of this trip are unique mountain landscapes, presented with a respect for nature as a space of spiritual sanctuary. Zumulanma is a time-lapse sequence of deep-blue skies and distant snowcaps of Mount Everest, which are beautiful to behold yet oxygen-poor and merciless to most living creatures. Saga Dawa is a hypnotic soft-focus view of tourists and pilgrims partaking in a Tibetan Buddhist festival, surrounded by uniformed police who consider large gatherings tinder for rebellion. Kora, named after a type of Tibetan meditation that is done while walking, documents his own four-day walk around Mount Kailash in a bid to find peace. Born in 1968, Liou is currently a professor of digital art at Indiana University in Bloomington.
■ Taipei Fine Arts Museum (臺北市立美術館), 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 July 20
Photo Courtesy of Adi Panuntun
We Art Together (當偶們同在藝起) brings together ceramics, paper puppets, wood engravings, stop-motion animation and other artworks by 636 students. Each year, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei sends artists to Cheng Yuan Senior High School (成淵高中), Jan Cheng Junior High School (建成國中) and Rixin Elementary School (日新國小) to teach six to eight-week courses in specialized media, from which this exhibition is a result.
■ MOCA Studio Underground (地下實驗), Zhongshan Metro Mall, near Exit R9 (捷運中山地下街,近R9出口), tel: (02) 2552-3721. Free admission
■ Until June 29
Photo Courtesy of TFAM
Metal Creation (鍊金術) is a group exhibition that chronicles the development of blacksmithing over the past 20 years in Taiwan. It offers live demonstrations and features 146 objects: daily items and tools, accessories and art pieces by top blacksmiths and apprentices in the trade.
■ National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute, 573 Zhongzheng Rd, Caotun Township, Nantou County (南投縣草屯鎮中正路573號), tel: (49) 233-4141. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9am to 5pm
■ Until Oct. 12
The Art of Chu Teh-chun (朱德群藝術展) is a retrospective exhibition honoring a leading abstract painter who passed away this March in Paris. Chu Teh-chun was born in 1920 in Suzhou, China, and fled to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War. In 1955, he moved to Paris and began to depart from his earlier figurative works, experimenting with abstract pieces that combined Chinese calligraphy with light washes of oil paint. In 1997, Chu was elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris as the first Asian-born member in its history. Tina Keng Gallery (耿畫廊) brings together 40 of Chu’s representative pieces dating from the 1950s to the 21st century.
■ Tina Keng Gallery (耿畫廊), 15, Ln 548, Ruiguang Rd, Taipei City (台北市瑞光路548巷15號), tel: (02) 2659-0798. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 7pm
■ Until June 1
At Wonder of Fantasy: 2014 International Techno Art Exhibition (奇幻視界:2014國際科技藝術展), artists from around the globe use cutting-edge projection techniques and image formats to create 16 digital spectacles. This year’s program features workshops, forums and lectures by the world’s leading thinkers in new media theory, including Eleanor Gates-Stuart from Australia and Machiko Kusahara from Japan’s Waseda University. For more information, visit fantasy.ntmofa.gov.tw
■ National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (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 August 31
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