The term “globalization” has been thrown around haphazardly since the 1990s without much chops to back it up — not everyone can afford to buy a smartphone, let alone travel the world and experience different cultures. Japanese artist Takahiko Suzuki challenges the concept of “globalization” by photographing small neighborhood shops around Taiwan — mostly betel nut stands, seeing as they representative of the working class. These tiny shops don’t have grand advertising schemes and aren’t on social media — rather, hanging a simple sign over their store front will suffice since their customers are mostly from the local community. After photographing these stores, Suzuki prints out the images and converts them into three-dimensional models of the original stores. He then takes these models to other countries where he gets passersby to hold them up so that he can photograph them. That to him seems like a more accurate image of “globalization.” Suzuki’s artwork is currently on display at Taipei’s IT Park Gallery in an exhibition entitled Global-Store Project: feat. 2.5D Betel Nut Kiosk (全球商店計畫:2.5D檳榔攤).
■ IT Park Gallery (伊通公園), 2F-3F, 41 Yitong St, Taipei City (台北市伊通街41號2-3樓). Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 1pm to 10pm. Tel: (02) 2507-7243
■ Until July 25
Photo courtesy of Taiwan Design Center
It appears to be a good week for Japanese artists in Taipei. 76-year-old photographer Daido Moriyama usually captures everyday street scenes in Japan, from stray dogs lazing about to children playing outside of ramshackle homes and prostitutes making the rounds at some old haunts. For his latest exhibition, A Room, held at Aura Gallery in Taipei, Moriyama still shows a fascination with what society says is forbidden, but in a different way — through photographing nude women in very suggestive poses. Achieved through his signature black-and-white style, making use of depth and light-dark contrast, these series of photographs thread a fine line between art and pornography. But they still manage to be intense and beautiful. In 2008, Moriyama told Playboy magazine that it was a dream of his to photograph nude women in 8 by 10 frames. Creepy? Just a little. Perhaps there’s good reason that the exhibition is restricted to an 18+ audience only.
■ Aura Gallery Taipei (亦安畫廊台北), 313, Dunhua N Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段313號). Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 12pm to 7pm. Tel: (02) 2752-7002.
■ Opens tomorrow. Until Aug. 1
Photo courtesy of IT Park Gallery
Much of Lin Kuo-wei’s (林國威) work is inspired by his experience being an expat in Paris. Many of his installations fixate around the concept of displacement — the objects he creates may appear to fit in to a particular setting, but upon closer examination, they actually stand out like sore thumbs. As it states on Lin’s Web site, he “endeavors to understand the odd in the ordinary and the insignificant in the monumental.” His latest solo exhibition, Interstice (間隙), which is held at Michael Ku Gallery in Taipei, is aptly titled in the sense that Lin sees himself as occupying the tiny, overlapping space in a Venn diagram in which the two categories are the two cultures he’s tried to immerse himself in.
■ 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 tomorrow. Until Aug. 16
Photo courtesy of Michael Ku Gallery
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Japanese product designer Sori Yanagi who helped to shape the modern design industry from post-war Japan to the late twentieth century. Yanagi, whose designs were a blend of minimalist simplicity and bits of inspiration drawn from Japanese tradition, was a fervent believer that true beauty could not be manufactured; but rather, that it was an inherent quality. Ironically, he labored intensively to create his simple but beautiful structures. The Taiwan Design Center at Songshan Cultural and Creative Park is holding a retrospective exhibition for Yanagi. Called Beauty Born, Not Made (美,渾然天成,無法製造), the exhibition includes some of Yanagi’s most famous pieces, including the Butterfly Stool, a two-piece seat that resembles both a butterfly’s wings and the gateway to a Shinto shrine.
■ Taiwan Design Center (台灣創意設計中心), Songshan Cultural and Creative Park (松山文創園區), 133, Guangfu S Rd, Taipei City (台北市光復南路133號), tel: (02) 2745-8199. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9:30am to 5:30pm
■ Until Aug. 30
Green Island (綠島) is known for its amazing coastal scenery where vacationers brave either the rickety plane or stomach-churning ferry to get there and do some outdoor activities like snorkeling or hiking. Less known is that the island off the coast of Taitung used to house and execute political prisoners. Tainan’s National Museum of Taiwan History seeks to make this piece of history known to more people through their latest exhibition, Reflections on ‘Burning Island’— Youth in Exile (沉思火燒島— 被流放的青春). Featuring old photographs, sketches, telegrams, letters, film interviews and other documents from the ‘50s and ‘60s, the exhibition unearths the stories of the youth who protested against the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Photographs show that the main work of the prisoners at the New Life Correction Center (新生訓導處) which opened in 1951, was to cut wood and grow crops. Telegrams also indicate that the outcome of some of the trials were predetermined with prisoners being sentenced to death.
■ National Museum of Taiwan History (國立臺灣歷史博物館), 250, Chang-he Rd Sec 1, Tainan City (台南市長和路一段250號), tel: (06) 356-8889. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9am to 5pm
■ Until Nov. 22
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