While the lighting of the lanterns already took place last week, Meet the Light 2016 Treasure Hill Environmental Art Lantern Festival (邂逅那道光2016寶藏巖環境藝術燈節) is still ongoing at Taipei’s Treasure Hill Artist Village. The annual festival which requires participants to use environmentally-friendly or recycled items to create artwork, will see a number of performances and installations, as well as handicraft workshops conducted by nine different artists from around the world. For those looking to play sleuth in the name of “interactive art,” be sure to attend the More Than Useful Detective Lab/ Conductive Ink Lab. The next workshop will be held on Sunday.
■ Treasure Hill Artist Village (寶藏巖國際藝術村), 2, Ally 14, Ln 230, Dingzhou Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市汀州路三段230巷14弄2號), tel: (02) 2364-5313. Open Tuesday to Sundays from 11am to 6pm
■ Until March 20
Photo courtesy of 1839 Contemporary Gallery
Traveling within Everyday Life (常日.行旅) is an exhibition at Taipei Artist Village that is about, well, traveling and everyday life. It posits that travel isn’t just something that we do once in a while for vacation or work, but that as expats in particular, travel is a constant state of being that affects the way we perceive the world around us. The participating artists hail from a number of different countries and backgrounds. Included in the lineup is UK artist Helen Couchman, who did a series of portraits of workers in Beijing, as well as Japanese artist Kosuke Ikeda whose most recent exhibition in Tainan integrated found objects such as old bicycles and mouse traps to tell a narrative about the hidden parts of pristine cities.
■ 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
■ Opens tomorrow. Until March 20
Photo courtesy of Cafe Showroom
1839 Contemporary Gallery is currently exhibiting New Vision of Countryside — Farmhouse (農村新景觀—農舍) by Chao Bin-wen (趙炳文). The Taipei-born Chao, whose previous work focused on factories and mills, turns his gaze to so-called “farmhouses” in the Taiwanese countryside. The subject matter is not so much farmhouses, though, but hideous-looking, ostentatious mansions that dot the landscape of Yilan’s rice fields. Chao’s photography seems to criticize these structures, suggesting that they are eyesores to the landscape rather than amplifying its natural beauty.
■ 1839 Contemporary Gallery (當代藝廊), B1, 120 Yanji St, Taipei City (台北市延吉街120號B1), tel: (02) 2778-8458. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 8pm
■ Until March 27
Photo courtesy of Vandy Rattana
Huang Pei-ju’s (黃珮如) paintings of indistinct silhouettes and cityscapes made to look like colorful, random splotches are on display at Cafe Showroom starting tomorrow. Entitled A Window (失而復得 這是為你開的 一 扇窗), the exhibition is metaphorical in a number of ways. While windows expose things, they also provide a limited or constricted viewpoint. Likewise, Huang wants to give viewers a general sense of what’s going on in the scenes she depicts, but without revealing the full picture. It is the job of the viewer, she believes, to open the window themselves and examine closely the minute details of her paintings before drawing conclusions. Be sure to look carefully and you might make out a vague skyline of New York or Las Vegas.
■ Cafe Showroom (場外空間), 462 Fujin St, Taipei City (台北市富錦街462號), tel: (02) 2760-1155. Open daily from 11am to 9pm
■ Opens tomorrow. Until March 27
Born in Phnom Penh in 1980, Cambodian artist Vandy Rattana was lucky not to live through the Khmer Rouge genocide which ended in 1979, yet his videos and photographs — most of which deal with the sociological trauma of the aftermath — serve to remind us of the importance of remembrance and healing. Bomb Ponds in particular strikes an eerie chord — while the rice fields may look peaceful, landmines planted there in the 1970s might still explode if you dare venture out. Rattana’s latest exhibition at The Cube Project Space, entitled Working-Through: Vandy Rattana and His Ditched Footages (透工 — 萬迪拉塔那與他所捨棄的影像), includes some of his latest, more experimental work completed since the artist relocated to Taiwan. Evident in his artwork is a sense of historical documentation as well as his own interpretation of the psychological effects of the genocide. They also provide a certain hope that these traumas can be collectively overcome.
■ The Cube Project Space (立方計畫空間), 2F, 13, Alley 1, Ln 136, Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段136巷1弄13號2樓), tel: (02) 2368-9418. Open Wednesday to Sunday from 2pm to 8pm
■ Opens tomorrow. Until May 15
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