Eslite Gallery is currently showing Metamorphoses Lecture Proposal (變形記演講計畫), a solo exhibition eight years in the making by Taiwanese artist Kuo Wen-shyang (郭文祥). Beginning in the 80’s, Kuo spent many years in Barcelona and France, where he studied a variety of mediums, including drawing, film and printmaking. His present show features a series of prints divided into five chapter: melancholy, harmony, existence, freedom and emptiness. Through these stages, the artist interprets the idea of metamorphosis through several classic French literary masterpieces including those of Arthur Rimbaud, Albert Camus, Honore de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire and Czech-born German novelist Franz Kafka. “In a world of metamorphoses, things are at once real and dreamlike, while individuals undergo various states of mind as they transform physically and perhaps psychologically,” writes the gallery in a statement. Kuo’s prints are accompanied by fragmented excerpts that Kuo selected from fellow artist Luo Pin-che (羅品?)’s poetry book. “A poetry book is the cemetery of words, and the artist is the tomb raider,” writes the gallery. Through Kuo’s act of deconstruction, “the riddled, fragmented phrases… call for the history and the goodness of the past.”
■ Eslite Gallery (誠品畫廊), 5F, 11 Songgao Rd, Taipei City (台北市松高路11號5樓), tel: (02) 8789-3388. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until Aug. 26
Photo Courtesy of Eslite Gallery
Lee Tzu-hsun (李子勳) is a Beijing-based Taiwanese artist who works between a number of art disciplines, including painting, sculpture, architecture, stage design and performance art. The multiplicity of his practice allows him room to explore a combined potential of expressivity and new possibilities. “I don’t believe that there is a clearly defined world; hence I have always been fascinated by the un-definable,” says the artist. The title of the show, The Alien Galaxy (異星系), suggests a search for an unfamiliar, parallel world and an interest in ideas of cosmic order. “My art has always been about the researching, analyzing, hypothesizing and reassembling of this, like being in an open process of growth, forever and endlessly shaping a new world,” Lee says. The exhibition features a selection of works from different stages of his career, including Sequential Aircraft, a new series of wall-hung, metallic sculptures that are meant to resemble industrially produced flying machines. According to the museum, these forms are biomimetic creations that “are interposed between life form and non-life form.” Mystery of the Glass Beads is a kinetic installation that takes on the theme of universal order with 1,500 marbles that gradually shift position pushed by the movement of three highly stylized mechanical objects.
■ Taipei Fine Arts Museum (台北市立美術館 TFAM), 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
■ Until Oct. 14
Photo Courtesy of Whitestone Gallery
10th anniversary, Banana tree, Memorial, Sulfur, Storytelling, Arrangement, Perfect, Hyper trace, Third (十年、椰子、芭蕉樹、紀念、硫磺、說故事、安排、美好、幻聲跡、第三) is the third iteration in a series of exhibitions that celebrates the 10th year anniversary of Project Fulfill Art Space. The presentation of the show is designed to develop over the course of five weeks, with a new work added every week. The exhibition will finally culminate in a group exhibition of five Taiwanese artists that work in painting, sculpture, story-telling, conceptual and sound art. According to the gallery, the time-based exhibition format is inspired by the art of flower arranging, which involves a process of sorting, trimming, adjusting and stylizing. It is in this context that the works by Chou Yu-cheng (周育正), Hsieh Mu-chi (謝牧岐), Syu Jia-jhen (許家禎), Yang Chi-chuan (楊季涓), Wang Fu-jui (王福瑞) will be curated into an integral display that collectively speaks to the idea of the past. Chou’s Flowers for Opening is a display of congratulatory flowers delivered to the exhibition site by art institutions; the project reflects upon the institutional networks and relationships within the art world.
■ 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 Sept. 15
Photo Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei
Dale Chihuly is an iconic American artist and entrepreneur best known for his large blown-glass sculptures and architectural installations. Chihuly has a background in interior design and sculpture and began experimenting with the art of glassblowing in the 1960’s, working with a team of glassblowers to achieve projects of great scale and complexity. Chihuly describes himself “more choreographer than dancer, more supervisor than participant, more director than actor.” His Taipei show at White Stone Gallery, CHIHULY: Taipei (奇胡利:台北), is a continuation of his March exhibition at the gallery’s Hong Kong branch with a different selection of artworks. The show features a number of projects that demonstrate the artist’s ongoing experiments with light, space and form. Chihuly manipulates glass in a variety of capacities, sometimes to form experimental paintings, wall-hung compositions or spatial installations. Rotolo is a sculptural series of glass coils wrapped around a core structure that shows off “the substantial yet intricate and delicate nature of glass,” writes the gallery. Glass on Glass is a series of paintings created by multiple enamel drawings on glass sheets layered onto one another to build up a collective composition. The exhibition features a new painting created especially for the Taipei show: Ikebana: Glass on Glass, which depicts an abstract pot of flowers against a soft background of magenta and blue.
■ White Stone Gallery (白石畫廊), 1 Jihu Rd, Taipei City (台北市基湖路1號), tel: (02) 8751-1185. Opens Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 9pm.
■ Until Sept. 23
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Curated by Huang Chien-hung (黃建宏), Trans-Justice: Para-Colonial@Technology (穿越─正義:科技@潛殖) is a group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, that takes on the themes of global political movements, justice and the role of technology in shaping the future. Huang addresses artmaking as something that can evoke social and political change. “Artistic creativity, especially imagination on forming new relationships between individuals and the world... will be the core demand for the next phase of democracy and technological development,” he says. The show includes 12 international and Taiwanese artists, including an installation of archival material from the Nylon Cheng Memorial Museum Collection (鄭南榕紀念館館藏). The display seeks to encourage new ways of discovering and understanding the history of Cheng beyond his abstracted representation as a symbol of justice. Chinese artist Xu Tan’s (徐坦) Water, Land and Turf is an installation of eight videos and installations about his research into the Tanka people of Guangzhou and their history of land use. The project also includes an interactive component that encourages viewers to contribute their thoughts concerning the topics of his study.
■ Museum of Contemporary Art (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) 2559-6615. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm
■ Until Oct. 21
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Photo Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei
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
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
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s