Taiwan will not only have a presence at this year’s Burning Man, a week-long experimental community festival set in the Nevada desert, it’s doing it with a go big or go home spirit. A massive 200-meter wide, 12-meter-tall Matsu Temple (媽祖廟) built on site out of wood will be the installation’s centerpiece.
Burning Man, which begins today and runs until Sept. 7, sees nearly 70,000 artists from around the world descend on Black Rock Desert, forming the temporary community of Black Rock City. All kinds of creative activities take place, and bartering and self-sufficiency is the rule. In the end all artwork will be burned or taken home, leaving no trace of the event behind.
Sponsored by the Dream Community (夢想社區), an artist village in Sijhih District (汐止) district known for its Brazilian-style carnival parades throughout the nation, the project cost about NT$20 million.
Photo courtesy of the dream community
Dream Community chairman Gordon Tsai (蔡聰明) says he has wanted to send a team to represent and promote Taiwanese and Asian culture at Burning Man since 2005, but their proposals were rejected each year.
The Matsu proposal includes three parts: the physical temple, where people can throw divination blocks, learn qigong, dancing and reciting Matsu sutras. A hologram Matsu will show her presence when somebody prays and, when someone gets three lucky divination throws in a row, eight dragons on the roof of the temple will breathe fire. A ninth dragon is left at the Dream Community headquarters to connect the two locations.
The team also has a Taiwan Village at Burning Man, which features a night market, betel nut beauties, Taiwanese music and activities such as Eight Generals (八家將) face painting. A carnival-style Matsu procession, open to anybody, will take place twice from the village to the temple, which takes about an hour, featuring colorful characters that tell the story of Matsu.
Tsai says he hopes to involve artists outside of Taiwan as well, and the Dream Community has invited 10 young professionals from around Asia to help out with various duties such as music direction and poster design. They’ve been training and working in Taiwan for two months and will travel to Nevada as part of the team that will run the temple and village activities.
While the temple, costumes and decorations are hybrids of traditional and modern styles, the activities are authentic and the team members trained with professionals, learning how to grill Taiwanese sausages, perform traditional dances and so on.
“We’re not just bringing traditional culture there,” Thisby Cheng, a team member from Hong Kong, says. “We’re looking at how tradition can be combined with art.”
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