Becoming/Taiwanese (想像之所) is a solo exhibition by Taipei-based photographer Tsao Liang-pin (曹良賓), who uses the Chinese martyr shrines (忠烈祠) dotted across Taiwan as a departure point to examine the continuing process of re-writing history and national identity building that has shaped the context of what it means to be Taiwanese over the last 300 years. The martyr shrines, built upon previous Japanese Shinto shrines, are commemorative sites established by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) after their takeover in 1945. For Tsao, these memorials are more than simply places of remembrance: “they were a means to obliterate existing history…to redistribute economic resources…[to enforce] a new political system and nationalist identity into people’s everyday life,” the gallery writes in a press release. Over the past few years, the artist has researched and photographed 21 of Taiwan’s martyr shrines, many which are today viewed more as tourist attractions than political constructs of nationalism. In this de-politicized climate, Tsao presents his photographs as light-boxes alongside archival images of previously existing Shinto shrines in an attempt to visually trace the dynamics of “What is means to be Taiwanese” between the two periods of time.
■ TKG+ Projects, 2F, No. 15, Ln 548, Ruiguang Rd, Taipei City (台北市瑞光路548巷15號2F), (02) 2659-0798. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until April 29
Photo Courtesy of Joseph Kosuth Studio
The group exhibition, Still Waters Run Deep, at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts coincides with the museum’s inauguration of two newly renovated galleries after half of year of construction. The exhibition takes the city’s vital waterway, the Love River (愛河), as a metaphor to celebrate the cultural depth and rich history that Kaohsiung embodies. According to the curator, “the exhibition aims to demonstrate a calm and slow-paced cultural progress that reflects a tranquil sense of self-awareness, and, like a river, has traversed boundaries, connected different parties and encompassed all differences.” While the curatorial tone seems overly promotional, the exhibition includes 14 international and local artists whose works have garnered much attention. Renowned American artist Joseph Kosuth’s new neon light installation, Mappa Mundi (Taiwan), runs along a large white wall, sometimes forming words and other times loosening into abstract waves. Yoshihiro Suda’s delicate wood carved tulip is suspended in an unexpected corridor of the museum, creating a poetic pause in the exhibition flow. Legend Lin Dance Theatre (無垢舞蹈劇場), known for slow, spiritual dance performances, presents an installation, Poetry in Motion, which takes its title from one of the company’s celebrated dances.
■ Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (高雄市立美術館), 80, Meishuguan Rd, Kaohsiung City (高雄市美術館路80號) tel: (07) 555-0331. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9:30am to 5:30pm
■ Until June 10
Photo Courtesy of TKG+ Projects
When the Decisive Moment is No Longer Eternity (當決定的瞬間不再永恆) is an intimate retrospective of photographer Hsieh Kuei-chang (謝貴昌). The title is a re-interpretation of Henry Cartier-Bresson’s 1950’s concept “the decisive moment,” which refers to the instant a photographer captures the essence of an ephemeral event. While celebrating this classic concept of humanist photography as a constant influence in his work, Hsieh also questions its relevance in today’s increasingly digital age as our relationship with time and material reality is rapidly changing. In this exhibition Hsieh asks us to reconsider the value and legacy of modern photography today. The show presents a selection of 44 photographs that Hsieh has taken during his travels through Taiwan’s diverse landscape over the past 20 years. These images are made with various kinds of film and show consistent experimentation with the medium. Flake Yard (1998) is a black and white photograph manipulated with darkroom effects that depicts a pair of suspended dried fish in a small town setting on the outlying island of Penghu. Fallen Blossoms Flowing Stream (1996) is a close-up of flower petals floating down a river in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投). The dream-like colors rendered in this photograph owes to Hsieh’s experimentation with a cross-processing technique that increases the saturation of color.
■ Taipei Cultural Center (台北市藝文推廣處), 25, Bade Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市八德路3段25號) tel: (02) 2577 5931. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 8:30am to 5:30pm
■ Until March 8
Photo Courtesy of the artist
The Renewal (川游不息) is a site-specific art exhibition that features artworks inspired by the sound, sight, smell, touch and taste of Green River (綠川), one of Taichung’s main water canals that traverses through the city’s old district. The 6.1km canal, once a healthy water stream, began degrading in the 1980s with the city’s industrial development. Under the supervision of Taichung’s Water Resource Bureau, the canal has been undergoing renewal since 2014. In this exhibition, 12 artists work with varying sensory capacities to interpret the canal from different angles. Lim Giong (林強), ALLO WILL and BARKHER collectively present a soundtrack that poetically encapsulates the rhythm of city life that surrounds the canal with field recordings and electronic compositions. Plant artist Liao Hao-jhe’s (廖浩哲) organic installation is built with local plant species such as different types of fern, moss, and herbal ingredients typically found in the herbal tea sold in Taichung’s old city district. These elements are infused with the odors of moist earth, herbal flavors and other materials the artist collected along the canal.
■ Taichung Shiyakusho (臺中市役所藝術中心), 97, Mincyuan Rd, Taichung City (台中市民權路97號), tel: (04) 307-7357. Open Mondays to Fridays from 11:30am to 7pm, and weekends from 11am to 7pm.
■ Until March 11
Photo Courtesy of Lyu Chuan
Visit the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, for ’S WANDERFUL | MAKING PICTURES, the first solo show of veteran American photographer Steve McCurry in a Chinese-speaking country. McCurry is celebrated internationally for his work in photojournalism and editorial photography. He is best known for his iconic Afghan Girl image, originally published in National Geographic in 1984 and later named the most recognized photograph in the history of the magazine. The image is a portrait of a young Pashtun orphan at a refugee camp near the border with Pakistan. McCurry and his team later reconnected with the young girl 17 years later. ‘“Her skin is weathered; there are wrinkles now, but she is as striking as she was all those years ago,” McCurry says. In this exhibition, Afghan Girl is presented as a collage installation in which different parts of the photograph are reconfigured in varying scale and coherence. The show also includes eleven other installations based on McCurry’s photographs, among which are a selection of images shot in Taiwan, including Taipei Grand Hotel Lobby, Readers at Huashan and a portrait of iconic Taiwanese photographer Ko Si-chi (柯錫杰). According to curator Leo Chang-jen Chen (陳昌仁), the exhibition seeks to reconsider McCurry’s work in the context of contemporary art.
■ Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (台北當代藝術館, MOCA, Taipei), 39 Changan W Rd, Taipei City (台北市長安西路39號), tel: (02) 2552-3721. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm
■ Until May 6
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep
Years ago, I was thrilled when I came across a map online showing a fun weekend excursion: a long motorcycle ride into the mountains of Pingtung County (屏東) going almost up to the border with Taitung County (台東), followed by a short hike up to a mountain lake with the mysterious name of “Small Ghost Lake” (小鬼湖). I shared it with a more experienced hiking friend who then proceeded to laugh. Apparently, this road had been taken out by landslides long before and was never going to be fixed. Reaching the lake this way — or any way that would