Sprouting (冒出芽) is a free-spirited show of paintings and prints created by children and mentally disabled students between the ages of four and 23. This show is collectively organized by three private art centers that offer art programs to children and Lin Yuchen (林宥辰), an art tutor for disabled people. Haiton Art Center (海桐藝術中心), Lemon.sub Studio (檸檬子畫室), Ringo Art Education Center (Ringo藝術教育中心) and Lin Yuchen operate in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, and Taichung respectively and provide seasonal courses with different creative agendas. The works on view are all created in class; some are made as a group exercise while others are individually authored. As a whole, the show features fanciful narratives, childlike caricatures and carefree use of colors; these traits are consistent throughout the exhibition, demonstrating a general confidence in mark-making and vision. The students from Lemon.sub Studio are showing colorful prints displayed together with their print blocks, while the children from Ringo Art Education Center have together created two large scale drawings using different teamwork techniques. The exhibition hopes to encourage children’s creativity and celebrate their natural openness to imagination.
■ Haiton Art Center (海桐藝術中心) 2F, 75, Hami St, Taipei City (台北市哈密街75號2樓), tel: (02) 2559-6360. Open Wednesdays to Saturdays from 3pm to 9pm.
■ Through Dec. 23
Photo Courtesy of Powen Gallery
Negotiating the Future (關鍵斡旋) is the sixth edition of the Asian Art Biennial organized by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. This year’s show is curated by an international group effort, including Kenji Kubota (Japan), Ade Darmawan (Indonesia), Wassan Al-Khudhairi (Iraq/US) and Lin Hsiao-Yu (林曉瑜, Taiwan). Together they share an interest in examining the changing relationship between art and society, the role of art in creating dialogue, alternative platforms of communication and understanding as well as imaginations of the future. The exhibition features 36 artists whose works resonate with the central themes in varying ways. The Japanese artist group Chim↑Pom has built an asphalt road on the museum’s outdoor plaza that functions as a shortcut from the public street to the museum building. This new road literally creates a connection between the institution and the public, opening a general question of the role of the museum and art in society. Jordan and Palestinian artists Shuruq Harb, Samah Hijawi and Toleen Touq’s The River Has Two Banks is an ongoing project that examines the geopolitical issues between their two respective countries, as well as ways in which local groups have found ways to overcome political, social, and economical boundaries to form alliances with one another. Liu Ho-jang’s (劉和讓) Infantry Company addresses the continuing impact of arms trade and other economic systems that have evolved out of the Cold War era.
■ National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (國立台灣美術館), 2, Wuquan W Rd Sec 1, Taichung City (台中市五權西路一段2號), tel: (04) 2373-3552. Open Tuesdays to Fridays from 9am to 5pm, Saturdays and Sundays from 9am to 6pm.
■ Through Feb. 25
Photo Courtesy of Life Seeding Gallery
A Perpetual State of Flux: 20 Years of TNNUA (南藝陶瓷20年) celebrates the 20th anniversary of the ceramics studio at the Tainan National University of the Arts (台南藝術大學). Established in 1997, the studio has been led by Professor Chang Ching-yuan (張清淵) since its inception. The exhibition gathers 38 alumni of the graduate studies program, many of which have either continued their creative work or have found other art-related pursuits. At Gallery Life Seeding, the group presents the first leg of their two-pronged exhibition, which features 260 pieces of applied ceramic art such as tea ware, vases, bowls and cups. These objects are all handmade, with many created especially for this exhibition. Unlike typical art shows that prohibit close contact with the artworks on view, this exhibition allows viewers to handle the crafted objects and directly sense their physicality. Because many of the objects on view are created by alumni who often work in the realm of fine art, their interpretation of applied art forms are particularly distinct in style. The gallery is housed in a 100-year-old building from the late Qing Dynasty that organizes art exhibitions and events with a special interest in craft-related forms of art such as ceramics, glass, metal, dyeing and carpentry.
■ Gallery Life Seeding (綻堂蒔光) 302, Dihua St Sec 1, Taipei City(台北市迪化街一段302號), tel: (02) 2550-1275. Opens Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm.
■ Through Jan. 5
Photo Courtesy of National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
Lee Chung-chung (李重重) is a veteran Taiwanese artist who creates beautiful abstract ink paintings that provide a space of spiritual dialogue and introspective thoughts. Born into a family of painters, Lee has been dedicated to the art of modern ink painting over the last half century. She has played an important role in Taiwan’s post-war art development, and co-founded the Chinese Ink Painting Study Association (中國水墨畫學會) in 1968. In her solo exhibition Poetic Universe (詩意的宇宙) at Liang Gallery, a series of recent paintings show rhythmically composed works of graphic, black shapes highlighted with blue, red, and yellow washes. Abstract strokes, rubbings, stains, and brushwork create atmospheric spaces that suggest natural scenes such as a lake, rock formations, mountainous landscapes and water below a bridge structure. These paintings are titled with poetic phrases that reflect a pensive state of mind: “Indulging in this Windless Afternoon,” “The Breath of the Sea,” “The Fortune of the Word,” “The Song of My Heart” — perhaps the artist has left these remarks as clues to enter her inner, poetic universe.
■ Liang Gallery (尊彩藝術中心) 366, Ruiguang Rd, Taipei City(台北市瑞光路366號), tel: (02) 2797-1100. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 6pm
■ Through Jan. 7
Photo courtesy of Liang Gallery
Chuang Pei-xin’s (莊培鑫) solo exhibition Under Right Circumstances (如果在適當的條件下) extends the artist’s ongoing interests in understanding our present day reality caught between the virtual and physical world. His sculptures and videos in this exhibition particularly deal with the explosion of information in the age of the Internet, and how we process the constant flux of imagery we encounter daily online and offline. Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 are a series of two-minute videos composed of stock video footage found in a free online database. Each video is narrated by a professional voiceover who reads a mistranslated excerpt of a BBC news article about aerial archaeology. The artist wrung this text through every language possible in Google Translate before finally leaving it in Chinese form, which he then uses as the narration in the videos. The sculptures in this show use a similar method of collection and disintegration to process still photos that he has either taken himself or found on the Internet. The eight seemingly soft sculptures hang from the walls, some supported by nonspecific metal rods while others are accompanied by small rock weights. These anamorphic acrylic forms with digitally printed photo collages were melted methodically by the artist to form creases and folds that suggest a state of fluidity.
■ Powen Gallery (紅野畫廊), 11, Ln 164, Songjiang Rd, Taipei (臺北市松江路164巷11號), tel: (02) 2523-6009. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 7pm.
■ Through Dec. 24
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and