Japanese artist Yuko Tanaka was inspired by the hydrangeas she saw on a mountain one summer and found the flower’s beauty to be both melancholic and timeless. It was as if the hydrangeas “insisted on the importance of life,” Tanaka writes in her artist statement. Her first solo exhibition in Taiwan, Season into Time (燦令盛蕊), which opens tomorrow at Caves Art Center, will feature a collection of her paintings of flowers and landscapes. The color palette in each painting is different but the feeling is the same — that of sheer sublimity.
■ 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 29
Young Art Taipei (台北國際當代藝術博覽會) is back for the ninth year at the Sheraton Grand Hotel and featuring works of artists below the age of 45. VIP viewing starts today and doors are open to the public tomorrow and Sunday. This year’s fair includes 63 galleries from around Taiwan and the world, including artists from 15 different countries. ArtDoor Gallery and In River Gallery are among the Taipei galleries to be featured. For those not looking to break the bank, Bluerider Art will be selling merchandise by American artist Rine Boyer. Her humorous and flippant prints of hipsters can be found on socks, cups and t-shirts.
■ Sheraton Grand Hotel (喜來登大飯店), 9F, 12, Zhongxiao E Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市忠孝東路一段12號9樓)
■ Saturday and Sunday from 12pm to 8pm. Admission is NT$300 at the door
Photo courtesy of caves art center
Hsu Chiao-yen (許喬彥) draws inspiration from discarded objects and uses them to create jarring but beautiful sculptures that stick out at odd angles. His latest exhibition, Fail to Reach (不及), at Project Fulfill Art Space explores the interrelated concepts of vulnerability and insignificance. Hsu came up with the theme while watching a bird perched helplessly on a branch during a snow storm. Like many exhibitions at Project Fulfill Art Space, Hsu’s exhibition is multisensory and makes use of smell (lime powder) and sound (trickling water) rather than being a purely visual experience.
■ Project Fulfill Art Space (就在藝術空間), 2, Alley 45, Ln 147, Xinyi Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市信義路三段147巷45弄2號), tel: (02) 2707-6942. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 1pm to 6pm
■ Until May 6
Photo courtesy of Mind Set Art Center
On display at Mind Set Art Center is Self-Portrait (自畫像), a joint exhibition of self-portraits by 13 artists from around the world. The self-portrait has a long history, helping artists to refine their technique and practice introspection and reflection. While some of the self-portraits displayed are realistic, others are abstract. Tang Jo-hung (黨若洪) paints himself as somewhat of a caricature with flailing limbs and clownish mannerisms. Juin Shieh’s (謝鴻均) palette is just as colorful as that of Tang’s, though her subject matter appears to be a little more serious. Through a series of swishes and swivels, she alludes to a harried but loving mother (herself, of course) taking care of a newborn. The white in the painting refers to breast milk.
■ Mind Set Art Center (安卓藝術), 7F, 180, Heping E Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市和平東路一段180號7樓), tel: (02) 2365-6008. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 11am to 6pm
■ Until May 6
Photo courtesy of Mind Set Art Center
Chinese artist Gao Lei (高磊) is known for his ability to transform industrial materials into sculptures that resemble paintings or delicate artifacts. This can be seen in his eponymous solo exhibition, Gao Lei (高磊), held at Asia Art Center II. Made from stainless steel, marble, nylon, pewter and an assortment of other materials, Gao’s sculptures combine industrial simplicity with artistic beauty, the result of which is serious but silly, methodical but chaotic. For instance, his stainless steel carvings appear to depict machine diagram, but they can also be interpreted as a snide to how the state operates as a machine without taking into consideration human emotion.
■ Asia Art Center II (亞洲藝術中心二館), 93, Lequn 2nd Rd, Taipei City (台北市樂群二路93號), tel: (02) 8502-7939. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6:30pm
■ Until May 14
Photo courtesy of Asia Art Center
Opening tomorrow at Aura Gallery is The Theater of Apparitions (靈魂劇場). While American photographer Roger Ballen is known for his haunting, nightmarish black-and-white portraits of lower-class and marginalized people in South Africa, this series focuses on monsters and apparitions — or more precisely, human beings rendered ghost-like through Ballen’s photo editing-process. Ultimately, Ballen is conveying the fact that we all have secrets buried deep beneath us and that sometimes it’s okay to simply unleash the monster in our subconscious.
■ Aura Gallery Taipei (亦安畫廊台北), 313, Dunhua N Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段313號); tel: (02) 2752-7002. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 12pm to 7pm
■ Opens tomorrow. Until May 20
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