Lu Mu-jen (呂沐芢) and Chiao Sheng-wei (焦聖偉) are childhood best friends and artists who are out of this world. Their collection of artwork depicting various alien, plant and animal life forms intertwined inside UFO-shaped single-celled organisms is currently on display at Frees Art Space (福利社) in Taipei’s Zhongshan District (中山).
When asked if they believe in aliens, both artists responded in the positive with blank looks on their faces which read, why is this question even being asked? Lu has never seen an alien in real life, but Chiao says he’s seen something that looked like a UFO when he was at graduate school in Greater Tainan. Despite their different experiences though, both artists steadfastly believe that life on other planets exist and use this as inspiration for their newest collection, the Euglena Program of Art.
COMMUNICATION IS KEY
Photo Courtesy of Association of the Visual Arts in Taiwan
The artists were putting the finishing touches on their latest addition to the collection, dabbing paint on their canvas in near-perfect sync as photographers snapped away and reporters scribbled in their notepads. Lu and Chiao never discuss what to paint beforehand. Their style is impromptu and organic — they simply pick up their brushes and see where the painting takes them.
“It’s like we are having a conversation with each other but with brush strokes, not words, and it’s exciting not knowing what the next brush stroke or what the end result will be” Lu said.
Communication is one of the key messages in their artwork. Within the earth itself there are numerous modes of communication, many of which are not discernible to the human eye or ear.
Photo Courtesy of Association of the Visual Arts in Taiwan
“Take dolphins for instance,” Lu said, referring to the dolphins in many of their paintings. “They are highly intelligent creatures who communicate through their sonar abilities.”
Lu and Chiao’s logic is that just because humans cannot see, hear, touch, taste or feel something does not mean that it does not exist. Naturally, this logic extends to aliens and life on other planets — perhaps other-worldly creatures use other means of communication, and they have been trying to reach out to us, but we simply cannot detect their message.
The Euglena Program of Art is essentially Lu and Chiao projecting this logic onto canvas. As Chiao says, “no one can yet prove the existence of aliens, so we feel like we have to express it through art instead.”
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
OTHER-WORLDLY BUT DOWN-TO-EARTH
From afar, the Euglena Project of Art resembles colorful UFO heads. Up close, it’s more of a mish-mash of animals, organisms and elements thrown together — dolphins that swim upstream, cats that smoke cigars and aliens that sprout eagle-like wings. And yet — maybe it’s the random smiley faces interspersed throughout almost every painting — it just seems like everything is coexisting in perfect harmony, or at least, the different elements are trying to understand each other.
“We draw such animals and aliens altogether because they are all very smart creatures,” Lu said.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
He adds that he and Chiao both grew up loving the abundance of nature in Taiwan and watching all sorts of television shows and movies. As a result, their art has been influenced by four main tenets: aliens, nature, environmental issues and human beings like Bruce Lee (李小龍) or Michael Jackson who have changed the world in a positive way.
“Such a combination is not possible in real life, but in art, it’s possible,” Chiao says, “therefore, our paintings represent a type of hope.”
Just as there is no definitive answer to the question “do aliens exist?”, there is no definitive meaning behind Lu and Chiao’s paintings. Lu says that the paintings show how “aliens are trying to teach us peaceful messages like mutual understanding and how to preserve the environment.”
Chiao says that to him, the most important message is “a feeling of harmony.”
Likewise, each individual will have his or her own interpretation, although Lu and Chiao say that they hope their artwork will evoke happy feelings in their viewers since they were largely inspired by elements and experiences which made them happy.
So, while Lu and Chiao may seem out of this world, their desire for peaceful coexistence amongst the various elements of worldly and other-worldly life forms is rather endearing and down-to-earth.
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
RSS