Chinese artist Hang Chunhui (杭春暉) creates paintings that blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Trained in Western abstract painting and Eastern ink painting, Hang’s earlier works showed interest in combining ink-and-brush techniques with Baroque art concerns such as religious symbolism, manipulation of light and techniques of perspective and illusion. In the last five years, Hang has moved on from issues of representation to explore ideas of visual duality between representation and abstraction. His solo exhibition, Intertextuality (齊物), at Asia Art Center features four new series of paintings that address the relationship between material and form, and matter and space. The title of the show riffs off of Chuang Tzu’s (莊子) On Leveling All Things (齊物論), where truth is described as “a construct of contradicting perspectives,” writes the gallery, “everything may be either positive or negative, decided by the beholder.” Message Obscured by Form is a series of paintings that show hyper-realistic representations of books. The minimalist manner in which these books are stylized make them appear as books in one instant and abstract geometric forms in another. These two readings reveal a duality of reality and illusion that can be observed when exercising different ways of seeing.
■ Asia Art Center II (亞洲藝術中心二館), 93, Lequn 2nd Rd, Taipei City (台北市樂群二路93號), tel: (02) 8502-7939. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6:30pm
■ Until Jan. 27
Photo Courtesy of Nunu Fine Art
Universitas: A special exhibition of the University Museum Association of Kyoto (京都好博學!) opens tomorrow at The Museum of National University of Education. Established in 2011, The University Museum Association of Kyoto is an alliance among 14 college museums formed to “collaboratively explore Kyoto’s cultural history and context,” reads the exhibition’s press release. To this end, the show features more than 200 cultural and natural objects that were originally used as educational tools and teaching aids in classrooms and field trips. The show is organized into three parts: The “Hall of Knowledge,” “Life in Kyoto” and “Exotic Exploration,” themes contextualized by academic surveys, cultural studies and historical artifacts of Kyoto and beyond. Exhibition highlights include early 20th century botanical sketches, a clay model of silkworm anatomy, a miniature electric car from the Showa period and a wall chart that demonstrates the history of Japanese helmet design. The show offers a rare glimpse into the Japanese educational system and the cultural heritage of Kyoto.
■ Museum of National University of Education (北師美術館), 134 Heping E Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市和平東路二段134號), tel: (02) 2732-4084. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 5pm
■ Until Feb. 24
Photo Courtesy of Museum of National Taipei University of Education
Lin & Lin Gallery presents After the Financial Crisis and Automated Production (金融風暴與自動化生產之後), a solo exhibition by prominent artist Chen Chieh-jen (陳界仁). Chen is known for creating video installations that critically reflect on Taiwan’s modern and contemporary history. His works often engage with visions of society and reflections on collective memory. The show addresses the global state of corporate control over society, especially in the context of financial technologies that have a stranglehold on the “perceptions, desire and thinking of individuals [and systems],” writes the gallery. The show posits the question: “Is there a way for people to get out from under this situation?” Chen presents three recent works that reflect on this issue. In these works, the artist references the “Middle Way,” a philosophical principle associated with the Madhyamaka School of Buddhism. The Middle Way claims a dialectical approach to concepts of self-existence and emptiness and speaks of a state of “neither arising nor ceasing, neither permanence nor nullification, neither identity nor difference, neither coming nor going.” Taking the Middle Way as a departure point, “Chen hopes to establish a new worldview and value system, and find ways for people to respond to our current modes of thinking and the societal frameworks in which we live.
■ Lin & Lin Gallery (大未來林舍畫廊), 16 Dongfeng St, Taipei City (台北市東豐街16號), tel: (02) 2700-6866. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until Jan. 26
Photo Courtesy of Asia Art Center
Abstraction Contextualized (訓詁‧抽象) is a new show by the late Chinese-American artist George Chann (陳蔭羆). Chann was a pioneering artist who became active in the 1950s and 1960s movement of Oriental abstract expressionism. Together with Zao Wou-Ki (趙無極) and Chu Teh-chun (朱德群), Chann blended art traditions from the West and East. “Before the much-known works of the abstract genre were conceptualized, these pioneers had long been immersed in the studies and experimentation of traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting culture,” writes the gallery. “These early practices gave root to a solid Eastern texture in their oeuvre which is characterized by a principle of writing.” The influence of Chinese characters and calligraphy was consistent throughout Chann’s career. His early works began with a deconstruction of written language with ink techniques, which later evolved through many stages of abstraction and interpretation. Chann’s show at Tina Keng Gallery includes a selection of paintings dating from the 1950s to the 1980s, which attest to his artistic journey.
■ Tina Keng Gallery, 1F, 15, Ln 548, Ruiguang Rd, Taipei City (台北市瑞光路548巷15號B1), tel: (02) 2659-0798. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until Jan. 20
As part of its annual winter exhibition program, Nunu Fine Art presents The Spaces within the Spaces within the Spaces (空間中的空間的空間), a group exhibition by four artists from Taiwan, Denmark, Hong Kong and the Philippines. The title refers to a method of building bridges between the private and public spheres, as well as the artist and viewer, a notion conceptualized by art critic Camilla Jalving. By using objects that serve as familiar cultural codes, Jalving addresses the transference of meanings between different spheres as demonstrated in Danish artist Jasper Bonnen’s work. Bonnen works with various art forms to explore the relationship between individuals and spaces. His new painting, The Difficulty of Choice, depicts a network of interrelated forms that seems to blur the boundaries between the exterior an interior. Cheng Ting-ting (鄭婷婷) draws inspiration from her daily surroundings. Domestic items such as sofas, tables, sinks and mattresses are considered as lived spaces that both express a material experience of the objects as well as the memories the artist associates with them. Wang Liang-yin (王亮尹) is a Taiwanese artist who explores the relationship between spirituality and the material world. Wang “considers objects to be [both pure physicality] and evidences of flow of emotions and thoughts,” writes the gallery.
■ Nunu Fine Art (路由藝術), 5, Ln 67, Jinshan S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市金山南路一段67巷5號), tel: (02) 3322-6207. Open Wednesdays to Sundays from noon to 7pm
■ Until Dec. 30
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
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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