Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (台北當代藝術館) presents Living Sound — Expanding the Extramusical (超音樂 — 異聲驅動), a group exhibition that considers sound in relation to the social, cultural and political. Sound and speech are present in many aspects of life, writes curator Lai Yi-hsin (賴依欣), and shapes the intricate channels of communication between individuals, groups, societies and cultures. In her curatorial text, Lai lays out the exhibition in three parts. The first part explores how meanings are produced and reproduced through different phases of interaction between people and objects. Wang Hong-kai’s (王虹凱) Sweet Minor Keys (甜小調練習) is a long-term research-based project that probes the sonic space of Taiwan’s sugar industry between the Japanese colonial period and post World War II. The second part focuses on sounds from daily life that are re-contextualized in the museum space. Chiang Chung-lun’s (江忠倫) Nobody Band #MOCA Taipei is a collaborative project with the museum staff that reflects on their work experiences through documentation and performance. The final segment explores the potential of sound as a propeller of individual and collective social agency. Isaac Chong Wai’s (莊偉) One Sound of the Futures (位於未來的聲音) is a multi-channel video that documents a series of participatory performances in which over a hundred people speak simultaneously about their future.
■ 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 July 7
Photo Courtesy of National Education Center
Chang Ting-tong (張碩尹) is a Taiwanese artist based in London who works across a variety of mediums, including installation, drawing, performance and video. Chang draws from science, biology and animatronics to explore the relationship between technology and society. His solo exhibition, Kosmos, presents an imaginative universe that takes its title from 19th Century German scholar Alexander von Humboldt’s famous treatise on nature and science. Humboldt proposed that all organic bodies are in some ways connected, an idea that “completely revolutionized the way we thought about ecosystems,” writes the museum in the exhibition preface. It is suggested that the show subscribes to Humboldt’s ideas and employs “similar methods to the scientists of the 19th century,” the preface continues. Through kinetic installations, film and drawings, the artist presents a network of historical research on a range of subjects including Asian tiger mosquitoes, Achaeans, automatons, tobacco cutworms and sturgeon. The show offers visitors an experience of conflicting dimensions in time and space, a fluid relationship between the analogue and the digital, the past and future and the cross-cultural. In the artist’s original cosmos, everything is at once “scientific, magical, antique and modern.”
■ 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 July 21
Photo Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei
Hsu Chia-wei (許家維) is a Taipei-based artist known for his visually captivating videos and installations that relate to omitted or forgotten histories of the Asian region. Working with images as a medium to ponder the past, the artist often bases his projects on research of a single place and weaves together many elements of the site through original narratives. His solo exhibition, Giant Panda, Deer, Malayan Tapir and East India Company, probes the history of the Dutch East India, its activities in Asia as well as the legacy of animal diplomacy throughout the Asian region. The panda, Malayan tapir and deer, three apparently unrelated species, have been “instrumental in shaping the relationship between Taiwan, China, Singapore, Cambodia and Japan,” writes the museum in a press release. The show investigates the politico-economic narratives between these countries and how the East India Company’s Asia trading networks forecast the future of globalization.
■ 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 June 23
Photo Courtesy of Dunhuang Academy
Dunhuang — A Testimony of a Thousand Years Cultural and Art Exhibition (千年萬象) offers a rare glimpse into the fascinating art and heritage of Dunhuang in China’s Gansu Province. Initially established as a military post in the Han Dynasty, Dunhuang quickly flourished into a major hub for commerce, cultural exchange and an important religious meeting place along the ancient trade routes of the Silk Road, which connected Asia, Western Africa and Southern Europe between 114BC and the 15th century. The show features a selection of replicated mural paintings and architectural information about the world-renowned Mogao Caves (莫高窟), initially dug out as meditation space for monks. By the Sui and Tang dynasties, the caves had become a place of worship and pilgrimage, adorned with elaborate murals that were inspired by Buddhism. The materials on view are produced by the Dunhuang Research Academy (敦煌研究院), an institution established in 1943 by the Chinese government to conserve, manage and conduct research on the caves in Dunhuang. An upcoming talk by Hou Li-ming (侯黎明), former director of the academy’s Research Institute of Arts is scheduled for May 28th.
■ Hwa Kang Museum (中國文化大學華岡博物館), 55 Huagang Rd, Taipei City (台北市陽明山華崗路55號), tel: (02) 2861-0511 X 17607. Open Mondays to Fridays from 9am to 4pm
■ Until June 21
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Fine Art Museum
Lee Hung-tai (李宏泰) is a Taiwanese painter who became familiar with the art of lacquer painting during his PhD studies, and is particularly drawn to its techniques and history. Lee’s paintings often depict subjects of nature, such as plants, insects, reptiles and other life forms. He is interested in portraying the diversity of organic life and exploring the relationship between subject, object and environment. Sange: Scattered Flowers (散華) is on view at the National Taiwan Arts Education Center (國立臺灣藝術教育館). Sange (散華) in Buddhist art refers to a scattering of flower petals, which speaks to Lee’s thoughts on the ephemerality of life and the eternity of the divine. He works from images, text and sketches generated during his travels. After images come into form, he then reassembles them into original compositions. “Sprinkled with gold or silver powder using the Maki-e technique, [a Japanese lacquer method that literally translates to sprinkled picture], the lacquered artworks express not only the feature of the natural matter but also the interwoven effect of light and color,” writes the center.
■ National Taiwan Arts Education Center (國立臺灣藝術教育館), No. 47, Nanhai Road, Taipei City (台北市南海路47號), tel: (02) 2311-0574. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9am to 5pm
■ Until Wednesday
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
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
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
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would