Atemschaukel (呼吸鞦韆) is an exhibition by Liu Xia (劉霞) and Tsai Hai-ru (蔡海如). Both women share a family history of political persecution and reflect on their experiences with images, words and installations. Liu is a Beijing-born poet, artist and wife of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波). While her husband was serving an 11-year prison sentence, Liu Xia was placed under house arrest for nearly a decade. “Her life under constant surveillance [was] filled with fear, solitude, distress and helplessness,” reads the exhibition press release. The 26 photographs on display were taken by Liu Xia while her husband was in prison. The photographs are accompanied by poems that reveal the affection held between the couple. Tsai is a Taiwanese artist whose father served over two decades behind bars as a political prisoner during the White Terror. Her father was arrested for being involved in a underground political party and activities. Tsai’s Flower of Life (生命之花) is an multimedia installation consisting of a small nude painting seen from above; a poetic text inspired by women who lived through the White Terror era; and a group of potted golden pothos, a house plant also known as devil’s ivy that produces what is known as the “flower of life.”
■ 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 May 26
Photo Courtesy of TKG+ Projects
Traditional Chinese Medical Texts on Life (壽而康) features a selection of traditional medical texts, documents, paintings and artifacts, many of which were part of the Qing imperial collection, while others are Japanese editions later acquired by the museum. The manuscripts not only provide an interesting mix of ontological theories and interpretations, the writings also show how religious beliefs and cultural systems have contributed to medical developments in China, Japan and Korea. Exhibition highlights include Xiuxiang Fanzheng (繡像翻症), an illustrated manuscript that classifies diseases according to their resemblance to different animal types. According to traditional Chinese theory, illness is caused by excessive forces, disturbed emotions, over-indulging in sex or bad diet. The book offers relatable metaphors of various diagnostics as well as methods of healing. The Golden Light Sutra is a Buddhist classic translated during the Tang Dynasty by renowned Buddhist monk Xuanzang (玄奘). The text contains narratives about morality, governance and health.
■ National Palace Museum (國立故宮博物院), 221 Zhishan Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市至善路二段221號), tel: (02) 2881-2021. Open daily from 8:30am to 6:30pm; closes at 9pm on Fridays and Saturdays
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Museum of Fine Arts
■ Begins tomorrow; until June 30
Luxuriant (扶疏) is a group exhibition of nine young Taiwanese artists. Lu Hao-yuan (呂浩元) is a painter who often works with figurative narratives. He presents in this exhibition a series of small works that record mundane memories of his daily life. Still lifes of his plants, pet myna and everyday objects are portrayed with a distinctly original style. Gao Ya-ting’s (高雅婷) landscape paintings show the complicated relationship between man and nature. Her work resembles the landscape (山水, shanshui or “mountain water”) tradition of ink painting while fluorescent textile patterns are interwoven into the painting surface. Huang Ke-wei’s (黃可維) dyptich uses flowing contours and layered colors that create rich visual dynamics.
Photo Courtesy of National Palace Museum
■ 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 May 19
Photo Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei
It is the Fate of Glass to Break (玻璃總是要破的) is a group exhibition at TKG+ Projects that examines economic and disaster forecasting. “There is a similar vein of logic between economic predictions and disaster warnings: both are gambling on various figures, betting on the future, as well as establishing an imagination of the (post-) disaster,” writes curator Lai Chun-chieh (賴駿杰). Lai says the work on display examines ideas about the past and future. The three participating artists analyze disaster narratives from different angles. Concerning ideas of fatality and destiny, Ding Chien-chung (丁建中) and Chen Fei-hao (陳飛豪) collaborate on an experimental installation, Up to 121. Dealing with the disastrous impact of a major typhoon in 1996, the work address systems of crisis control and the ephemerality of memory. Chang Chih-chung’s (張致中) document-based project examines history through image and text.
■ TKG+ Projects, B1, 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 April 28
“I’ve exchanged my life to fulfill my art,” the late Taiwanese painter Yu Peng (于彭) once said about his practice. Celebrated for his innovative ink paintings that observe modern life with literati sensibilities, Yu is lovingly remembered as an urban hermit and prolific painter who followed a unique path of creative development. Without formal training, Yu began as a street artist sketching portraits, forming a strong foundation in figurative drawing that became a persistent style throughout his career. Yu worked in a wide variety of media, including watercolor and pastel, oil and ink painting, woodcut printing and shadow puppet theater. A comprehensive retrospective of his career is currently on view at the Taipei Fine Art Museum. A Wanderer Between Heaven and Earth (行者.天上.人間) features 170 works divided by three developmental periods that span from 1980 to 2014. During his three-year sojourn in Shanghai in the late 90’s, Yu observed Chinese gardens and natural landscapes that made substantial impact in his later life. “Yu sought inspiration from the physical world to create fantastic landscape paintings, and ultimately reached his maturity in style around 2000, in the final years of his middle-stage in his art career.” The show depicts the evolution of Yu’s creative endeavors, complete with private letters and a simulation of the artist’s studio. A series of talks by Yu’s colleagues and friends will take place at the museum in April. For more details, visit: www.tfam.museum.
■ 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 June 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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist