Chinese photographer Luo Yongjin (羅永進) initially photographed people before moving on to shoot landscape and architecture throughout China. While his earlier work attempted to capture the general atmosphere of a place, his later work is more conceptual. His latest solo exhibition, A Place Far Away (他方之地), held at Taipei’s Aki Gallery, not only alludes to geographical distance, but sentimental distance as well. Although Luo travels around his homeland and photographs it, there’s a sense of blase detachment in his black-and-white shots of dreary buildings. Luo is a roamer — or a “flaneur” according to the gallery’s notes — who is dissatisfied with what he sees and life’s fleeting moments. Or at least that’s what he wants viewers to believe.
■ 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
■ Until April 24
Photo courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Chen Shiau-peng (陳曉朋) has always been fascinated by maps and geometric shapes. His work is influenced by his time spent working in Australia and the US, as well as his artist residency at Scotland’s Glenfiddich Distillery. Chen sees his paintings, woodcuts and sculptures — most of which are 2D and 3D geometric shapes, some colorful and others black and white — as symbolic of his own journey as a traveling artist. For Chen, the process of mapping is not just about overlaying images and plotting paths, but also about documenting time. His latest solo exhibition, The Integral Map (指鹿圖), opens at Taipei’s IT Park Gallery tomorrow.
■ IT Park Gallery (伊通公園), 2F-3F, 41 Yitong St, Taipei City (台北市伊通街41號2-3樓), tel: (02) 2507-7243. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 1pm to 10pm
■ Opens tomorrow. Until May 7
Photo courtesy of Eslite Gallery
Chinese artist Lin Yan (林延) has her first solo show in Taipei this weekend. The aptly named exhibition, Lin Yan (林延), opens at Eslite Gallery tomorrow and will feature a selection of Lin’s artwork, most of which incorporates traditional Chinese rice paper with materials such as nails, linens and strings. Born into a family of artists, Lin has lived and worked in the US since the mid-1980s. From 1994 to 2004, she created monochromatic drawings and sculptures with different gradations of black, all of which emphasized form and texture. In 2005, Lin shifted to working with rice paper, wrinkling, tearing and repurposing it to use as a base for her sculptures and installations. Her recent work has taken on a more critical angle, especially towards the problem of environmental pollution in China. Lin’s 2013 installation, Sky — long, billowing pieces of faded rice paper dangling from the ceiling — represents her hope for living in a world with cleaner air. Similarly, Bright Clouds (2014) consists of layers of wrinkled white rice paper forming a window which peeps into a blackened brick wall.
■ Eslite Gallery (誠品畫廊), 5F, 11 Songgao Rd, Taipei City (台北市松高路11號5樓), tel: (02) 8789-3388. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Opens tomorrow. Until May 8
Photo courtesy of IT Park Gallery
Wang Yu-chen’s (王郁媜) humorous, kooky drawings created by pencil and watercolor, and inspired by architecture and science fiction, are currently on display at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). Entitled Nostalgia for the Future (懷舊的未來), the exhibition is Wang’s first solo show in Taiwan and features a vast selection of her work created over the last 15 years when she lived in London. Wang’s drawings range from the tiny, to those that fill up entire gallery walls. They incorporate otherworldly figures, which, upon closer examination, vaguely resemble real-life machines. The idea is to show the symbiotic relationship between nature and technology and humans and machines, from industrialization in Victorian-era England to mass production in Taiwan today.
TFAM has another exhibition about post-modernism. Infinity Archives (無限的檔案) is a solo exhibition by young artist Jhou Yu (騆瑜) which explores the hyperreal site of consumption in postmodern societies. Our culture today is laden with simulation — we’re always looking for something “better” to reach a sense of fulfillment and technology is often the mechanism that enables us to attain this feeling. The result, however, is that fact and fiction becomes blurred, and rather than becoming more aware of our surroundings, we are actually losing touch with reality. Through interweaving historical archives with sketches, videos and installations, Yu forces the viewer to consider what life would be like without the most basic form of communication — language. Language is not just a way to express ourselves, but also a means to construct knowledge and power. Yu also draws an interesting comparison between contemporary art and capital, exploring how art is created for the purpose of consumption (in other words, making money), much in the same way that language is employed to exert power over other people.
■ Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM, 台北市立美術館), 181, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 3, Taipei (台北市中山北路三段181號), tel: (02) 2595-7656. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9:30am to 5:30pm and until 8:30pm on Saturdays
■ Both exhibitions are until May 22
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