The Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts is currently exhibiting Flamboyant Mobile Interactive — Formosa Wall Painting Group (赤燄 ‧ 游擊 ‧ 藝術交陪 — 新台灣壁畫隊). Featuring works by the Formosa Wall Painting Group, an art collective formed to make art more accessible and relatable to the public, the idea, as you might have guessed, is to cover entire walls — and in this case, ceilings as well — with paint. The results are colorful and stunning. They include images of scenes such as railroads and surf around Taiwan, along with more graffiti-like portraits.
■ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (關渡美術館), 1 Xueyuan Rd, Taipei City (台北市學園路1號), tel: (02) 2896-1000 ext 2432. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 5pm
■ Until Sept. 20
Photo courtesy of Aki Gallery
It may be late August, but summer is pretty much here to stay and Fan Yang-tsung’s (范揚宗) poolside paintings will make you want to grab your swim cap and goggles and take a leap off the deep end. Done in a minimalistic style, his paintings are playful and humorous — swimmers bare ridiculous tan lines and beachgoers sprawl out in the sand. In his close-up paintings, glistening sweat droplets on swimmers’ backs are discernible. Fan’s poolside-beach utopia is so tantalizing that he even makes sunburns look sexy. His paintings are currently on display in the aptly named exhibition, Humidity (氣味潮濕) .
■ 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 Sept. 20
Photo courtesy of Aki Gallery
In this day and age, we seem to always be working towards something “better” instead of simply savoring the moment. The latest exhibition at the Barry Room in Taipei Artist Village seeks to explore what happens when you detach yourself from your physical environment and learn to live in the now. Entitled False Start: Situational Exploratorium (請入歧途:情境式探索) the exhibition features five artists from all over the world and includes works such as eteam’s fake Kickstarter project, which examines how people raise funds for the most absurd and selfish “causes,” as well as Yoon Hyang-ro’s compilation of landscapes that appear in comic books, which she strips of dialogue and characters. Also on display are works by Sally Richardson, Lee Byung-ho and Helene Juillet.
■ 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 Sept. 23
Photo courtesy of A Gallery
Sound and light artist Yao Chung-han (姚仲涵) blurs the line between exhibition and performance in his new exhibition Light On-Site (時光現場) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei. In it, he explores various rhythms created by the glare emanating from fluorescent lights. Yao said in a 2011 interview that he’s absolutely fascinated by sound and light because “they can fill up a space in a second and fade away in a blink.” He has many abstract objectives — using sound and light to deconstruct the notion of time which he believes to be a human construct — but besides that, his exhibition is simply fun to wander about and pretend that you’re in an EDM club that’s actually somewhat tame.
■ Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (台北當代藝術館, MOCA), 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
■ Until Sept. 27
Inspired by Art Nouveau, a movement at the turn of the twentieth century that embraced household decorations and furniture as part of the realm of high art, NK Chao (趙南開) initially set out to create rainbow-colored tiles and glazed, transparent pottery. His artwork wavered between glossy and matt but tinges of color were always present in them. For his latest exhibition, however, Chao experiments with something different — namely, using white paint to paint his tiles. Yet he still manages to make use of texture, as well as light and darkness, to achieve a refreshing, effervescent feel. Endless White (白色無盡) is currently on display at Taipei’s A Gallery.
■ A Gallery (當代一畫廊), 22, Alley 36, Lane 147, Xinyi Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市信義路三段147巷36弄22號), tel: (02) 2702-3327. Open Mondays to Saturdays from 10am to 6pm
■ Until Oct. 10
The National Palace Museum never fails to deliver when it comes to delicate antiques that say as much about Chinese artistic and literary traditions as historical documents do. Their latest exhibition, The Printmaker’s Ingenuity and Craft: Ming and Qing Prints in the National Palace Museum (匠心筆蘊—院藏明清版畫特展), features woodcut prints made in the Ming and Qing dynasties which were also used as book covers and illustrations. The technique of woodcutting helped to introduce an aesthetic element to books. As such, books became objects that were not just enjoyed for their literary value, but their artistic value as well, as engravings were intricate and painstakingly done. The exhibition elegantly portrays the fusion of art and literature, and quite honestly, puts e-books and Kindle to shame.
■ 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 Jan. 10
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
By far the most jarring of the new appointments for the incoming administration is that of Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) to head the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF). That is a huge demotion for one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Tseng has one of the most impressive resumes in the party. He was very active during the Wild Lily Movement and his generation is now the one taking power. He has served in many of the requisite government, party and elected positions to build out a solid political profile. Elected as mayor of Taoyuan as part of the
Moritz Mieg, 22, lay face down in the rubble, the ground shaking violently beneath him. Boulders crashed down around him, some stones hitting his back. “I just hoped that it would be one big hit and over, because I did not want to be hit nearly to death and then have to slowly die,” the student from Germany tells Taipei Times. MORNING WALK Early on April 3, Mieg set out on a scenic hike through Taroko Gorge in Hualien County (花蓮). It was a fine day for it. Little did he know that the complex intersection of tectonic plates Taiwan sits
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50