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
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not