Tadaaki Kuwayama’s artwork is the type that you look at and think, “What’s so great about this? I could have painted it.” But there was a time in the 1960s, when painting an entire 110cm x 110cm canvas in blue or beige paint, was mind-blowingly revolutionary. Born in Nagoya in 1932, Kuwayama was trained in traditional Japanese painting on silk. It wasn’t until he moved to New York in the late 1950s that he started experimenting with his signature minimalistic-style monochrome paintings outlined with aluminum strips. A selection of his works from this period, From the ‘60s Til Today (60年代至今日), are currently on view at Taipei’s Galerie Grand Siecle.
■ Galerie Grand Siecle (新苑藝術), 17, Alley 51, Ln 12, Bade Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市八德路三段12巷51弄17號), tel: (02) 2578-5630. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 1pm to 6pm
■ Until Sept. 4
Photo courtesy of VT Art Salon
After two decades living and working in London and exhibiting her works at the Guggenheim in New York and the National Gallery in London, Suling Wang (王淑鈴) has returned to her hometown on the outskirts of Taichung. Making Waves, which opens at The 201 Art on Tuesday and derives influence from abstraction and Chinese landscape painting, attempts to reconnect with the natural landscape of Taiwan. She paints outdoors, using bamboo as her canvas and capturing seeds, leaves, twigs and other foliage, embedding them within layers of paint, in the process. The result is both calming and vibrant.
■ The 201 Art, 201, Wensin Rd Sec 2, Taichung City (台中市文心路二段201號), tel: (04) 2254-6455. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 1pm to 7pm
■ Opens Tuesday. Until Sept. 4
Photo courtesy of Internacional Errorista/ TFAM
Second Hand Emotion, currently on display at VT Art Salon, is a joint exhibition by Alexander Laner from Germany and the Berlin-based Danish artist Sofie Bird Moller. The title is derived from the lyrics of the 1984 Tina Turner song, What’s Love Got to do With It, alluding to the two-faced nature of love, how it can be exhilarating and spiteful. Both artists toy with the notion of aesthetic beauty, employing dark humor in their works. Laner, whose installations involve cars, grand pianos and big, clunky machine parts, considers himself a “sculptor.” In one piece, he builds his own kinetic cart from the engine of a motorcycle — you know, things that normal sculptors do. By contrast, Moller is known for tearing up and disfiguring the pages of fashion magazines and painting over them. She does this in an effort to force viewers to think that women are more than the sum of their sexuality.
■ 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 to Thursdays from 1:30pm to 9pm, and Fridays and Saturdays from 1:30pm to 10pm
■ Until Sept. 17
Photo courtesy of Cai Guoqiang/ TFAM
The works of American artist Carol Prusa are back at Taipei’s Bluerider Art. Infinite Cosmos: The Known and Unknown includes a selection of her well-known drawings of giant silver domes. Constructed with the painstaking precision of a mathematician, Prusa’s drawings take on a transcendent quality while at the same time showing us how the real world is created by geometric principles. Originally a chemistry major, Prusa switched to art and her work suggests that both artists and scientists are essentially dreamers.
■ Bluerider Art (藍騎士藝術空間), 9F, 25-1, Renai Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市仁愛路四段25-1號9樓), tel: (02) 2752-2238. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 9am to 6pm
■ Until Oct. 1
Photo courtesy of Suling Wang
Declaration/ Documentation: Taipei Biennial, 1996-2014 (朗誦/文件:台北雙年展1996-2014) documents all of the past Taipei biennials held at TFAM. This year’s biennial, which starts on Sept. 10, revolves around the theme of archives and memory, and is meant to be viewed in conjunction to this retrospective. Declaration/ Documentation also shows how contemporary art in Taiwan has evolved throughout the last two decades, particularly how it’s grown to be more global. It also serves to remind us the importance of remembering the past.
■ 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
■ Until Feb. 5
Photo courtesy of Galerie Grand Siecle
In the mainstream view, the Philippines should be worried that a conflict over Taiwan between the superpowers will drag in Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr observed in an interview in The Wall Street Journal last year, “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.” Such sentiments are widespread. Few seem to have imagined the opposite: that a gray zone incursion of People’s Republic of China (PRC) ships into the Philippines’ waters could trigger a conflict that drags in Taiwan. Fewer
March 18 to March 24 Yasushi Noro knew that it was not the right time to scale Hehuan Mountain (合歡). It was March 1913 and the weather was still bitingly cold at high altitudes. But he knew he couldn’t afford to wait, either. Launched in 1910, the Japanese colonial government’s “five year plan to govern the savages” was going well. After numerous bloody battles, they had subdued almost all of the indigenous peoples in northeastern Taiwan, save for the Truku who held strong to their territory around the Liwu River (立霧溪) and Mugua River (木瓜溪) basins in today’s Hualien County (花蓮). The Japanese
Pei-Ru Ko (柯沛如) says her Taipei upbringing was a little different from her peers. “We lived near the National Palace Museum [north of Taipei] and our neighbors had rice paddies. They were growing food right next to us. There was a mountain and a river so people would say, ‘you live in the mountains,’ and my friends wouldn’t want to come and visit.” While her school friends remained a bus ride away, Ko’s semi-rural upbringing schooled her in other things, including where food comes from. “Most people living in Taipei wouldn’t have a neighbor that was growing food,” she says. “So
Whether you’re interested in the history of ceramics, the production process itself, creating your own pottery, shopping for ceramic vessels, or simply admiring beautiful handmade items, the Zhunan Snake Kiln (竹南蛇窯) in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, is definitely worth a visit. For centuries, kiln products were an integral part of daily life in Taiwan: bricks for walls, tiles for roofs, pottery for the kitchen, jugs for fermenting alcoholic drinks, as well as decorative elements on temples, all came from kilns, and Miaoli was a major hub for the production of these items. The Zhunan Snake Kiln has a large area dedicated