When installation artist Chuang Chih-wei (莊志維) was in Tokyo completing a residency, he met a florist who told him about how flowers “sleep” at night, curling up into little balls and unraveling their petals only when the sun rises. Fascinated by this, Chuang set out to create artwork depicting various species of flowers during their “beauty resting” stage. Entitled Shadows (陰翳), the exhibition, which is currently held at the Barry Room in Taipei Artist Village, recreates the feeling of an experimental laboratory with some artistic elements. Light incisions pierce through the petals of flowers on dimly-lit desks and layers of fragile amoeba-shaped paper are overlaid in such a way that they resemble an organism under the lens of a microscope. Chuang’s exhibition effectively demonstrates how flowers can be just as beautiful at night in the shadows as they are during daytime in the sun.
■ Barry Room, Taipei Artist Village (台北國際藝術村百里廳), 7 Beiping E Rd, Taipei City (台北市北平東路7號), tel: (02) 3393-7377. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 9pm
■ Until Aug. 23
Photo courtesy of Aki Gallery
Mountains have become somewhat of a trite motif in art. Chinese brush paintings that depict mountains are undeniably lovely, as are landscape portraits with mountains in the background. Except after a while, the viewer starts wondering what the difference is between these artworks and why the artist painted them in the first place if it was just going to look like everything else. Kuo Chih-hung (郭志宏), who used to live in Germany, brings a refreshing take to the artistic genre of mountains in his latest exhibition, Everywhere, No Where, Now Here (郭志宏個展), which opens tomorrow at Taipei’s Aki Gallery. Kuo’s colorful brush strokes create rocky textures that thread the line of realistic and abstract. While some paintings dabble in earthy hues, others are more fantastical in nature — a dollop of pink here, purple there and icy blue for the mountain hidden in the background. The title of the exhibition alludes to Kuo’s own feeling of displacement, as well as the fact that the mountains he paints are not easily recognizable as belonging to a landscape of a particular place or time.
■ Aki Gallery (也趣藝廊), 141 Minzu W Rd, Taipei City (台北市民族西路141號), tel: (02) 2599-1171. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from noon to 6:30pm
■ Opens tomorrow. Until Aug. 23
Photo courtesy of Mind Set Art Center
When I think of gardens, I think of pretty lilies, arches covered in thorny roses and romantic benches encased with droopy vines. When artist Chi Chien (齊簡) thinks of gardens, he thinks of public spaces of control. Utilizing painting and installation, his exhibition, Passing Through the Post-Garden (穿越後花園), held at the Galerie Grand Siecle, is a semi-satirical take on how these beautiful green spaces — which are often times carved in the middle of cityscapes — are actually planned and designed with other intentions in mind, whether it be gentrification or something (allegedly evil) of the sort. In the backdrop in some of his paintings are nearly indistinguishable airplanes. Chi writes in the gallery notes that “flowers will always be flowers, just like airplanes will always be airplanes.” While difficult to decipher what this sentence actually means, a safe conjecture would be that Chi is trying to liken flowers and gardens to something massive, industrial and commercial. That certainly killed the romantic image I had of gardens.
■ Galerie Grand Siecle (新苑藝術), 17, Alley 51, Ln 12, Bade Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市八德路三段12巷51弄17號), tel: (02) 2578-5630. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 1pm to 6pm
■ Opens tomorrow. Until Aug. 30
Photo courtesy of National Museum of History
Growing up shuttling back and forth from the US and the Philippines, Filipina-American artist Hanna Pettyjohn’s patchwork-like paintings symbolize her own dual heritage and struggle to reconcile both sides of it. She writes in the gallery notes, “When I am in each place I am both home and away.” While Pettyjohn’s earlier paintings included people, notably her maternal grandparents, the work in her latest exhibition is more figurative. She employs a good dose of earthy hues and baby blues and yellows to give the semblance of dirt on the ground intertwining with crumpled pieces of clothing. The allusion to roots and its connection to root-finding, however, is a tad trite. Nevertheless, Pettyjohn’s paintings have a wistful feeling that lulls the viewer. A Web of When and Where (時空之網) will be on display at Taipei’s Mind Set Art Center.
■ Mind Set Art Center (安卓藝術), 16-1, Xinsheng S Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市新生南路三段16-1號), tel: (02) 2365-6008. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 2pm to 6pm
■ Opens tomorrow. Until Sept. 5
Sometimes I feel like the National Palace Museum exists so that we don’t need to read huge textbooks about Chinese history. The Art and Aesthetics of Form: Selections from the History of Chinese Painting (造型與美感-中國繪畫選粹) does exactly that. Featuring paintings from two millenia, the elegant exhibition traces the origins of Chinese brush painting from the Six Dynasties (222AD to 589AD) to the Qing Dynasty. As painting styles shifted from a literary calligraphic feel to a more expressive monochrome ink to a texturized technique that borrowed volume and perspective from Western art, certain motifs have remained constant. Birds and flowers were a persistent theme, as were landscapes. The Web site states that seen together, the artwork makes up a long “symphony,” with the various paintings as individual performances — or perhaps this is just another beautifully-sounding metaphor to promote the idea of Chinese history as being unbroken and perfectly harmonious when we all know it isn’t.
■ National Palace Museum (國立故宮博物院), 221 Zhishan Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市至善路二段221號), tel: (02) 2881-2021. Open daily from 9am to 5pm
■ Until Sept. 25
Chinese artist Sieur Augustin Tzen (曾仕猷) is as unique as his name sounds. Believing that his artwork — which spans painting, sculpture and installation — falls into no neat genre like abstract, minimalist or expressionist, he insists that it simply represents what he felt at the moment of creation. Having lived and worked in Taipei, Paris, New York and Beijing, Tzen’s artistic style is likewise all over the place, sometimes dabbling in black-and-white images, sometimes making use of the entire spectrum of a single color. While his paintings of women dressed in long, regal robes have a distinctly Oriental feel, his monochrome paintings appear more Western. There’s always something endearing about an artist who refuses to be categorized. It’s also uplifting to see an artist not hung up on questions of identity and belonging and to simply paint what he feels, even if no one will be able to piece together his various bits of inspiration. A Retrospective of Sieur Augustin Tzen (曾仕猷七十回顧展) is currently being held at the National Museum of History in Taipei.
■ 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 Oct. 11
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
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