Currently showing at Mind Set Art Center is For Tomorrow You Will Not Recognize Us (明日新貌), a solo exhibition by Filipino artist Victor Balanon who is known for his black-and-white paintings influenced by cubism. Here he paints a series of black-and-white portraits of famous avant-garde artists, though their faces are obfuscated by geometric lines and shapes, the result of which is both beautiful and grotesque. Like his other paintings, this series of portraits also has a multilayered and maze-like feel which has a dizzying effect.
■ Mind Set Art Center (安卓藝術), 7F, 180, Section 1, Heping East Road, Da’an District, Taipei (台北市大安區和平東路一段180號7F), tel: (02) 2365-6008. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 11am to 6pm
■ Until April 1
Photo courtesy of Mind Set Art Center
One, The One? (唯一.為一?) is a joint exhibition at ArtDoor Gallery featuring the works of six art students from National Taiwan Normal University that touch on the concept of spirituality, especially the idea that there is an intricate and tangible link between heaven and earth. It includes Chuang Teng-shiang’s (莊騰翔) spherical sculptures made from stainless steel and Tu Chih-wei’s (涂智惟) Chinese landscape paintings depict morbid and farcical people behaving gluttonously.
■ ArtDoor Gallery (藝境畫廊) 3F, 36, Lane 164, Hulin St, Taipei City (台北市虎林街164巷36號3樓), tel: (02) 2658-5268. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until April 2
Photo courtesy of Yiri Arts
Wu Shu-ling (吳淑玲) conjures up the serenity of her native Miaoli’s alpine forests in her wood-fired ceramics, which will be on display at Caves Art Center starting tomorrow. The Quest for Light (貢旭煉影) will provide viewers with a rare glimpse of Wu’s teapots, vases and plates, all of which are made by traditional wood-firing techniques that date back to the Shang Dynasty. Wood firing techniques recently became popular again and Wu manages to achieve this in a way that gives her ceramics the appearance and feel of being modern and minimalistic but also of being unearthed from an archaeological dig.
■ Caves Art Center (敦煌藝術中心), 91, Fujin St, Taipei City (台北市富錦街91號), tel: (02) 2718-2091. Open daily from 11am to 7pm
■ Opens tomorrow. Until April 8
Photo courtesy of TFAM
Lin Yi-pei’s (林宜姵) paintings of insects and other critters crawling over plants and people’s bodies will have even viewers with the most extreme entomophobia captivated. The Final Mild Blue (最後一頁麥德布魯), held at Yiri Arts, explores the ways in which things we normally associate with being disgusting can also be viewed as intriguing or even beautiful. People, plants and insects seamlessly merge into one amorphous entity in Lin’s paintings which have both a calming and an alarming effect. Ultimately, her message seems to be that we shouldn’t be too afraid to unleash the demons inside us.
■ Yiri Arts (伊日藝術), 4F/1, 5, Ln 768, Bade Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市八德路四段768巷5號4樓之1), tel: (02) 2786-3866. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 1pm to 7pm
■ Until April 16
Photo courtesy of ArtDoor Gallery
Opening tomorrow at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum is Wielding Poetry (焊藝詩情), a retrospective on sculpture Kao Tsan-hsing (高燦興). Kao, who has been working with stainless steel, marble, glass, plaster and iron since the 1970s, has also been involved with public art projects and he occasionally dabbles in other media. For his most recent series, Kao used discarded steel plates that he collected from automobile factories and welded them together to form transcended-like 3D figures. The idea, he says, is to transform gritty, tangible objects into things that we associate as being other-worldly.
■ 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
■ Opens tomorrow. Until June 25
Photo courtesy of Caves Art Center
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
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