If you love food, you’ll love Recollection of the Past (往事回味), a dual exhibition at Moon 12 Art featuring oil paintings of various delicacies created by artists Huang Shun-long (黃順隆) and Hsieh Yi-chen (謝易辰). Inspired by their mothers’ home-cooked meals and takeout food they ate from their childhoods, the exhibition includes paintings of chicken rice, burgers, cakes, M&Ms, chicken feet, stinky tofu and sashimi, to name a few dishes. Some of the food is laid out on chopping boards, and others, like the chicken feet and stinky tofu, are sitting in transparent takeout bags — something which night markets around Taiwan still use. Food is indicative of many things, like social and cultural trends, but most of all, it has the power to bring back memories through our olfactory and gastronomical senses, causing us to reminisce about the smells and flavors of our past.
■ Moon 12 Art (夢12美學空間), 12, Ln 209, Anhe Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市安和路二段209巷12號), tel: (02) 2377-1236. Open daily from 11am to 7pm
■ Until May 31
Photo courtesy of Michael Ku Gallery
Dual exhibitions seem to be popular this week in art galleries around Taipei. Kalos gallery is currently featuring On the Road to Landscape (往風景的路上), an exhibition consisting of tranquil landscape paintings by Chen Meng-tze (陳孟澤) and Su Yu-lan (蘇郁嵐). The gallery notes cite world-renown French artist Paul Cezanne’s landscape paintings as a source of inspiration, but the duo’s minimalistic style and choice of grayish and turquoise hues, evokes a calm, sleepy feel in stark contrast to Cezanne’s warm colors and bold outlines. Coming from two different generations, Chen and Su display in their work, a sense of continuity in artistic styles — the natural landscape as muse is here to stay.
■ Kalos Gallery (真善美畫廊), 269, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段269號), tel: (02) 2836-3452. Open daily from 10am to 6:30pm
■ Opens tomorrow at 3pm. Until June 6
Photo courtesy of Michael Ku Gallery
Yet another dual exhibition is J Ariadhitya Pramuhendra/ Jian Yi-Hong (普拉姆海德拉/簡翊洪). Held at Michael Ku Gallery, the exhibition explores the fluid concept of self-identification through the works of two very different young artists, J Ariadhitya Pramuhendra from Indonesia and Yilan-born Jian Yi-Hong (簡翊洪). Pramuhendra uses charcoal on canvas, creating forlorn but dynamic subjects through which he examines the history of religion, politics and culture in Southeast Asia and its contemporary relevance. In contrast to Pramunhendra’s intense canvas, Jian’s ink wash paintings seem light-hearted. From afar, his artwork resembles traditional Chinese ink paintings, but up close, armies of tiny naked men become evident — they are carrying carts, riding horses and going about their daily lives in the nude. His work explores the relationship between teenage boys and middle-aged men in a way that borders on pedophilia — but it’s still a clever rendition of traditional ink paintings.
■ 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
■ Opens Sunday at 3pm. Until June 7
Photo courtesy of Moon 12 Art
Chinese artists born in the 80s grew up in a very different era than their predecessors. While vestiges of authoritarianism are still pronounced in many aspects of daily life in China, technology has also made it possible to circumvent such structures. This is Not Video (不是影像) is an exhibition by five Chinese artists, Xu Wenkai, (徐文愷), Lin Ke (林科), Liu Guoqiang (劉國強), Liu Yue (劉月) and Zhu Changquan (朱昶全) at Taipei’s Asia Art Center II which explores the increasingly elusive artistic genre of digital or video art. Their work examines how technology has changed the way we view the world, obfuscating truths and giving rise to multiple interpretations of “fact.”
■ Asia Art Center II (亞洲藝術中心二館), 93, Lequn 2nd Road, Taipei City (台北市樂群二路93號), tel: (02) 8502-7939. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6:30pm
■ Until June 7
The Sichuan-born Chinese artist Wu Xuerang (吳學讓) who fled to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War, is known for his innovative renditions of traditional Chinese ink paintings. The late artist’s work often traversed the realms of modern and traditional — sometimes he chose warm, vibrant colors and abstract patterns, while other times, he opted for more subdued palates and calligraphy. A selection of Wu’s paintings, which spans decades of his artistic career, are currently on view at the National Museum of History in an exhibition entitled A Memorial Exhibition of Wu Xuerang: Paintings and Calligraphy (真水無香—吳學讓書畫紀念展).
■ 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
■ Until June 14
In Taiwan, it’s no secret that it rains cats and dogs in the late spring and early summer, giving us a warning sign that typhoons are about to come crashing in. Island Rain (島雨) is a dual exhibition by Wang Ting-yu (王挺宇) and Su Ming-hsin (蘇明欣) at Tainan’s Sing Art Gallery. The exhibition’s theme, as you might have guessed it, is rain. While Wang’s paintings are darker, grayer and little more sinister, Su’s watercolors are gentler, with hints of greens and turquoise creating a pensive lull.
■ Sing Art Gallery (新心藝術), 67 Shengli Rd, Tainan (台南市勝利路67號), tel: (06) 275-3957. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from noon to 8pm; closed Mondays and the second and fourth Sunday of every month
■ Until June 19
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
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
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
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would