Dr. Sleep (睡眠博士) is a solo show inspired by leaky faucets, loud electrical appliances and other things that keep artist Hsu Yinling (許尹齡) up at night. In Little Snowman (小雪人), a noisy radiator is the object of love for a beast made of ice, who sits with it in admiration while slowly losing life and limb. In Cat and Fountain (貓咪與噴泉), the leaky faucet becomes a grand fountain and a cat won’t leave her home even after it’s flooded with water. In 15 oil paintings, Hsu tries to confront the sights and sounds that the insomniac cannot turn off and to write them into fantastical bedtime stories.
■ 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 6pm
■ Until July 13
Photo courtesy of Metaphysical Art Gallery
The Door is Always Open (歡迎來我家) is Asia’s first comprehensive solo exhibition starring Gary Baseman, creator of the three-time Emmy Award-winning TV series Teacher’s Pet and designer of the best-selling game Cranium. The exhibition features 500 pieces, including designer toys and video works, as well as Baseman’s sculptural installations, paintings inspired by trips across Asia, fashion collaborations, pop surrealist art and illustrations published in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. Works are presented within an experiential house, featuring themed rooms furnished with pieces from the artist’s own childhood home.
■ Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA, Taipei), 39 Changan W Rd, Taipei City (台北市長安西路39號), tel: (02) 2552-3720. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm. General admission: NT$50
■ Opens tomorrow. Until August 24
Photo courtesy of DAC
At Animated in Blank (活化的空白), Jia Ming Day (戴嘉明) is showing six animations achieved with 3D printing or other alternative media. There’s Motion Print (印像), a merry-go-round populated with 3D printed figurines of “Qkid,” who strikes minutely different poses. As the platform twirls, the Qkids pass by a camera shooting at 24 frames per second, and the images are stitched into an unbroken animation. Who is Talking (看誰在說話) is an interactive talking head, featuring facial expressions generated by the optical toy Praxinoscope. When a viewer walks up and talks, the head talks back, via an intelligent light program that turns speech input into displays of light and shadow.
■ Digital Art Center (台北數位藝術中心), 180 Fuhua Rd, Taipei City (台北市福華路180號), tel: (02) 7736-0708. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm. Free admission
■ Until July 27
Is It Paper? brings together 11 artists who work on assorted sheets of paper: copy paper, handmade paper, rice paper, cardboard or hanji, a Korean paper made from the hardy decomposition-resistant bark of the mulberry tree. Each material comes with its own possibilities. Kuo Po-chuan (郭柏川) spreads oil paint on delicate leaves of rice paper, creating a western-style nude whose pink-red body seems too loud for the space it inhabits. With crayon on white copy paper, Yoshitomo Nara mimics fridge-top-style sketches, but his drawings of a wide-eyed little girl are often more adult than they seem.
■ Metaphysical Art Gallery (形而上畫廊), 7F, 219, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段219號7樓), tel: (02) 2771-3236. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 6:30pm
■ Until July 30
In solo show Room of One’s Own (自己的空間), Turkish artist Ilke Yilmaz presents collages, installations and sculpture that challenge the way humans are created and controlled by cultural narratives. Yilmaz brings her signature paper and aluminium dolls — women dressed to fit different constructed forms such as the “student,” the “grandmother,” the “frump” and the “witch/artist.” Lined up in a row, they are an army of full-figured women with identical tiny appendages, arms raised in an exuberant and defiant sameness.
■ Yesart Air Gallery, 2F, 48, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 7, Taipei City (台北市中山北路七段48號2F), tel: (02) 2876-3858. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 2pm to 8pm
■ Until July 20
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
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