Liang Gallery presents Entering Sekaikei — Bokurano (進入世界系:地球防衛少年), a solo exhibition by Chen I-chun (陳依純). Chen works between video, experimental animation, interactive art and painting. Her practice mainly focuses on social issues and stories that take place in industrial or marginalized areas. The Japanese term sekai-kei in the exhibition title literally means world-type and refers to a form of animation, cartoon, game or light novel that deals with human relationships in a world of crisis. Such stories have no affiliation to a specific nationality or society. The exhibition features a selection of screen-based works, paintings, video and sound that speak to a collective story of inner hardships. For this show, Chen interviewed a number of people about their thoughts on war. Each participant answered the question, “Hey, Siri, what is war?” In this work, many young people speak about emotional suffering and the daily struggles that they face. “These [shared] hardships blur the boundaries between country and society, thus we can see a bigger world,” writes the gallery in a release. Weaving together an emotional fabric, the show draws connections between people as they work independently towards a life of perseverance.
■ 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
■ Tomorrow to Sept 30
Photo Courtesy of Wildflower Bookstore
Catch the last weekend of Morning Anxiety’s (日安焦慮) exhibition A Field Guide to the Unknown (異星圖鑑) at Wildflower Bookstore. The show is a spectacular feast of mark-making and sci-fi motifs blown up to life-size scale. Visitors enter a narrow entrance of the gallery to find a generous display of paper boulders, reliefs, over 100 original drawings and a series of 3D works inspired by the artist’s newest comic book, Road to Nowhere. The gallery describes the scene: “Gigantic rocks block the road ahead, dim light pierce through layers of mountains and cracks in rocks. Dive into the light, you discover a world of fantasies [that is] yet somehow familiar. Is what you see really what you see? Or is it still a set built of another dream?” The themes of alternative realities, fantastical adventures and exploration of the unknown make the show “an antidote of reality lost in the unknown world where there are no boundaries between virtual and real.” Morning Anxiety is the pen name of artist Ding Pao-yen (丁柏晏) under which Ding publishes independent comic zines. He is deeply influenced by subculture, comic books and printed mediums.
■ Wildflower Bookstore (荒花書店), 7, Ln 69, Chengde Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市承德路一段 69 巷7號). Open Fridays to Mondays from 2pm to 10pm
■ Through Sunday
Photo Courtesy of Donna Art & Consulting
No Sooncheon is a South Korean multidisciplinary artist with a background in sculpture. After presenting his work at Young Art Taipei last year, No returns this year to Taiwan with a solo exhibition Between Lines (線與之間) organized by Donna Art & Consulting. The show features a selection of paintings, sculptures and installations centered on the artist’s ongoing exploration of the human figure. In No’s work, the body is often treated as an abstract silhouette, or contours personified with minimal, yet expressive face features. Even his sculptures maintain a sense of flatness, which the artist describes as a purposeful “deviat[ion] from the sense of mass and weight” that draws attention to sculpture as a medium that treats both two-dimensional surfaces and three-dimensional spaces. In his writings, No speaks about his interest in creating different relationships between space, form and line. He often experiments with scale as a factor that directly affects the viewer’s way of seeing. “The size of the work expands the viewer’s range of appreciation. This fact not only allows one to perceive the physical space that the work takes, but also the mental space as a piece of work by giving the viewer a space direction,” writes the artist.
■ Donna Art & Consulting (多納藝術), 7F, 112, Keelung Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市基隆路二段112號7樓), tel: (02) 7746-7463. Open Mondays to Saturdays from 11am to 7pm
■ Through Sept 22
Photo Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art
I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin (我要神、要詩、要危險、要自由、要良善、要罪惡) is a film program featured on the plaza of Taipei’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The program, with its daring title, seems to suggest a critique of modern society driven by a collection of thematic desires. According to co-curators Mark Lungley and Huang Yi-han (黃伊涵), the show consists of seven artists who explore the relationship between video and the real world while “challenging the physical and conceptual limits of what it means to live in the world today.” David Blandy’s The End of the World is a video that speaks about technology and memory. The narrative touches upon the end of the world and “a loss of connection to the server,” reads the exhibition brochure. A section of the film appropriates chat-room text from users of Asheron’s Call, a multi-player online role-playing game. Electra Lyhne-Gold’s The Self Centered is a video featuring a collectively-written script based on fictional and non-fictional events. The artist had invited several people to work on the script, which developed into a monologue delivered by an actress who plays the role of Lyhne-Gold. According to the curators, “This exhibition seeks to urge our reflection on the routines and restrictions in daily living, and to open up our imagination and thoughts for a better world.”
■ 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
■ Through Sept 30
Recent works by Japanese photographer Shinichiro Uchikura are presently on view at G. Gallery. Uchikura is an award-winning artist and grand prize winner of this year’s EMON Award for photography. The exhibition Dog Warriors & Baby — The Star of November (犬之戰士團&十一月之星) features two black and white series that speak to the essence of life and the power of documentary photography. The first series, entitled Dog Warriors, depicts a great number of Japanese domestic dogs. These portraits reveal not only their gentle and loyal appearance, but also their aggression and animalistic nature. The exhibition statement mentions an East Asian legend about how wild wolves became domesticated by humans and eventually evolved into pets. Through this project, the artist reflects upon the process of pacification in the history of civilization. The second series Baby — The Star of November is a project that takes on a more personal subject matter — the artist’s newborn son. While taking picture of his baby, Shinichiro observes the subtle responses of his child to things in his daily life. “A single drop of eyewash was dripped into his eye, at which he cried heartily, yet he shed no tears,” writes the artist. “The movement of the body, even the crying voice; I think of as the most primitive fundamentals of life.”
■ G. Gallery (居藝廊)B1, 3, Alley 3, Ln 227, Nongan St, Taipei (台北市中山區農安街227巷3弄3號B1), tel: (02) 2501-8326. Open Wednesdays from 12pm-7pm, Thursdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Through Sept 16
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