Let’s Get Married! (我們結婚吧!) is an endearing show with a strong exhortatory message likely aimed at boosting Taiwan’s marriage rate. Through black-and-white family photographs, interviews and color images from a second “wedding photography” session, the exhibition tells the story of 38 married couples from Yunlin’s Douliou City (斗六) and of their lives in the 20th-century.
■ Futai Street Mansion (撫臺街洋樓), 26 Yanping S Rd, Taipei City (臺北市延平南路26號), tel: (02) 2314-8080 ext. 21. Open Mondays to Saturdays from 10am to 6pm. Free admission
■ Until Jan. 31
Photo courtesy of Michael Ku Gallery
In Unfinished Journey (未竟之途), Hsu Wei-hui (徐薇蕙) presents her experience of modern womanhood as a choose-your-own-adventure. Visitors enter via Unfinished Road (未竟之路), a corridor of broken asphalt that forks into two rooms: one dimly lit and thematically dark, the other bright and both containing sculptures made with commercial facial masks and mirrors. Hsu received her MA in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design and and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. This program includes an artist’s talk on Sunday from 3pm to 4:30pm.
■ MOCA Studio at the 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. Free admission
■ Opens tomorrow. Until Jan. 18
Photo courtesy of MOCA, Taipei
Art Feast (買得起 藝術博覽會) is a mini art fair of oil paintings, traditional ink paintings, photography, sculpture and installation by top Taiwanese artists. Organized by the Chinese Art Manage International Commerce Association (中華藝術經紀國際交流協會), the fair seeks to promote the local collector’s market with pieces priced at an average of NT$70,000 and as low as NT$3,500. The show ends Sunday with an auction at 6:30pm. For more information, visit www.aaftw.org.tw
■ Sogoart Gallery at F1, 162, Jianguo S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市建國南路一段162號一樓), tel: (02) 2711-3577. Open Mondays to Fridays from 10am to 8pm, Saturdays and Sundays from 11am to 8pm
■ Until Sunday
Chen Sung-chih (陳松志) makes delicate sculptures with socks and other objects found around the house, on view now at Another Place (別境). With this unassuming assortment, Chen builds an alternate realm that’s comforting and hypnotic. “If life is like a soap opera, Another Place is then a simple and ordinary script based on life, and the people on this distorted stage are induced to repeatedly recount intertwining everyday words of fiction and reality,” he writes in the gallery notes.
■ 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
■ Opening reception tomorrow at 4pm. Until Jan. 17
Chinese artist Kuang Jun (匡峻) displays sculptures in a state of collapse at Decorative Metaphor — Atonement (裝飾中的修辭 — 贖罪), his first solo show in Taiwan. Kuang uses charred door frames, shattered glass and iron gratings detached from houses of China’s early Communist period — materials that are reassembled into crude stainless windows and figurines meant as emblems of a re-emerging consciousness.
■ Michael Ku Gallery (谷公館), 4F-2, 21, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段21號4樓之2), tel: (02) 2577-5601. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Opening reception at 3pm. Until Feb. 8
All in a Knowing Smile (拈花自在) is a retrospective of contemporary jade jewelry by Penny Wang (王佩南), a leading figure in today’s industry. The traditional jade ornament, historically worn as an expression of religious or moral qualities, is facing the challenge of a diminishing mainstream appeal. With edgy lines and visually ornate construction, Wang interprets unusual motifs like owls, turning the jade ornament of antiquity into quirky statement pieces.
■ National Museum of History (國立歷史博物館), 49 Nanhai Rd, Taipei City (台北市南海路49號), tel: (02) 2361-0270. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm. General admission: NT$30
■ Until Jan. 18
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