Dozens of pole dancers performed on ornate neon floats at a festival in Taipei on Saturday in celebration of one of the nation’s more eyebrow raising cultural traditions.
The event sought to promote Taiwan’s famous electronic flower trucks (電子花車), traveling floats loaded with garish lights in the shape of everything from dragons to ferris wheels.
The trucks are used to take performers — usually scantily-clad women and musicians — to private and public events, including weddings and even funerals, and are particularly popular in smaller towns and rural areas.
Photo: AFP
The tradition, dating back to the 1970s, reflects Taiwan’s folk religion and culture, which is a unique mixture of the spiritual and the earthly. For some, the trucks and their colorful performers are seen as the best way to create maximum fun and noise at important events.
But critics dismiss them as vulgar and tawdry. Over the decades, performances on the trucks usually featured striptease — with pole dancing a more recent addition. Stripping nude is rarely seen in public now because it is a criminal offense, but partial stripping is still often performed, even at grave sites.
Spokeswoman Wang Yi-ting said Saturday’s “Taiwan Color Stage Fest” — which is in its second year — aimed to bring the flower truck tradition to the capital, where it is less known than in central and southern Taiwan. Pole dancers performed to pop music on 22 trucks at a square near the capital’s landmark skyscraper Taipei 101 as the crowds, despite the rain, enjoyed snacks and free beer. There was no stripping and dancers were instructed to wear “more conservative” outfits, Wang said.
“We also want to encourage people in this unique and traditional performing business who are concerned about being eliminated in today’s diverse and digitalized entertainment industry,” Wang added. The event was partly inspired by a book by acclaimed Taiwanese photographer Shen Chao-liang (沈昭良), who traveled across the island to shoot the floats.
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
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would