VT Art Salon’s latest exhibition, Feigning Movement 10 — Art Only (假動作10 — 純藝術), presents the work of seven emerging digital artists, all of whom raise the question of what’s “real” and what’s “fake” in the age of digital art. Sometimes, photos are edited to the point where the end result is nearly unrecognizable from the original image — but is that actually misleading the viewer? Consisting of video installations, the exhibition turns a critical eye on itself as the artists overlay “real” clips with ones that are distorted and edited. The result is a confusing narrative structure which leaves us thinking that we really shouldn’t take everything at face value, especially in an era where the media oversaturates us with images.
■ VT Art Salon (非常廟藝文空間), B1, 47 Yitong St, Taipei City (台北市伊通街47號B1), tel: (02) 2516-1060. Open Tuesdays through Thursdays from 1:30pm to 9pm, and Fridays and Saturdays from 1:30pm to 10pm
■ Until Dec. 12
Photo courtesy of National Museum of History
Landscape painter and calligrapher Lee Shien-wen (李賢文) currently has an exhibition, The Odyssey of Light (光之道), that features a series inspired by Taiwan’s natural scenery. While some of his work is strictly black-and-white, others make use of cool pastel colors such as baby blue and light turquoise. Some paintings are more detailed and make use of background and foreground, while others are composed of minimal brush strokes and are lacking in perspective, mimicking the faint memories we may have of a place instead — so much so that it nearly evokes Western Impressionism. What Lee’s paintings have in common though is that they’re cheerful and calming and serve as testament to the healing powers of nature.
■ ArtDoor Gallery (藝境畫廊) 639, Ruiguang Rd, Taipei City (台北市瑞光路639號), tel: (02) 2658-5268. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until Dec. 13
Photo courtesy of TKG+
The feeling one derives from looking at Tu Wei-cheng’s (涂維政) work is akin to stumbling on a treasure trove of ancient artifacts on an archaeological dig. Tu, whose interest in archeology is apparent in Mapping Folds of the Body (身體軌跡的皺褶), takes everyday objects and sculpts and reshapes them so that they resemble antiques and ancient artifacts. He sometimes converts them into installations, for instance, by incorporating videos. The result is that viewers can’t help but wonder which objects archaeologists will be unearthing a hundreds of years from now, and what kinds of conjectures they will be making about us.
■ TKG+ Projects, B1, 15, Ln 548, Ruiguang Rd, Taipei City (台北市瑞光路548巷15號B1), tel: (02) 2659-0798. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until Dec. 27
Photo courtesy of ArtDoor Gallery
Nanjing-born, French-trained Chinese artist Jiang Dahai (江大海) exhibition, The Westward Journey of Eastern Art: A Retrospective of Jiang Dahai (東雲西漸—江大海回顧展), includes a vast collection of his monochrome impressionistic-style paintings from the last couple of decades. Having lived in Paris for more than half his life, Jiang once said that it was only after moving there that he understood why it was the birthplace of Impressionism. “It’s because the light and shade of the sky alter so beautifully every moment,” he said. Although Jiang clearly loves his adopted home, his paintings blend Western Impressionism with a Chinese sensibility. Both influences are conveyed through his controlled used of ink to create subtle but dreamy clouds.
■ 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 Dec. 27
Some rare works by the 18th-century Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione, who became a painter at the Imperial Court of China’s Qianlong Emperor in 1715, are currently on display in Portrayals from a Brush Divine: A Special Exhibition on the Tricentennial of Giuseppe Castiglione’s Arrival in China (神筆丹青-郎世寧來華三百年特展). The exhibition commemorates Castiglione’s three-hundredth anniversary of arriving in China. Although he painted numerous portraits of the Qianlong Emperor and used rice paper and silk, his style was a blend of Chinese and Western influences, the Western touch being colors, as well as the use of backgrounds and foregrounds. Some of his other tasks included decorating the Old Summer Palace with Western-style furniture.
■ 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. 4
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
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located