Tomorrow commences the 20th edition of Taipei Children’s Arts Festival (台北兒童藝術節), a two-month, family-friendly program of theater performances, workshops and exhibitions that celebrate the notion of differences. The festival encourages an awareness of the diverse relationships around us and the uniqueness of every individual, writes the festival in a press release. A total of 24 art groups from Taiwan and abroad make up a rich lineup of theater, dance, variety show and music. There’s No Big Bad Wolf Here (這裡沒有大野狼) is a new production by Taipei Performing Arts Center (台北表演藝術中心) based on the classic story of Little Red Riding Hood. To attend Riding Hood’s birthday, the audience must traverse through the forest where the Big Bad Wolf lives. The production involves a series of body movement and percussion activities staged in an interactive setting. World Images by Danish company Theatre Madam Bach integrates sound, music, words and movement to represent various sites of wonder around the globe. From the rhythm of underground trains, the formation of white salt deserts, to northern lights dancing in the sky, the production is a celebration of the world we live in and the incredible planet that we call home.
■ 19 venues around Taipei City. For more details visit www.tcaf.taipei
■ Through Aug. 4
Photo courtesy of Bamboo Curtain Studio
The Songshan Cultural and Creative Park (松山文創園區), established in 2011, is a thriving, cultural hub for exhibitions and performances located in a former Japanese era government-run tobacco factory. Once the largest tobacco factory in Southeast Asia, the operation was at its peak a company of almost 2,000 workers who lived and worked on the factory premises. In honor of its legacy, the cultural park presents 80th Anniversary of Songshan Tobacco Factory (松菸八十), an exhibition that looks back at the factory’s history via a presentation of archival material, including films, documents, package designs and furniture that remain from its heyday. The show features over 100 old photographs that offer insight into the daily life of the factory workers, as well a comprehensive display of 200 original architectural drawings that reveal the design and construction of the compound.
■ Songshan Cultural and Creative Park (松山文創園區), 133 Guangfu S Rd, Taipei City (台北市光復南路133號), tel: (02) 2765-1388. Open 10am to 6pm.
■ Through Aug 18
Courtesy of KHAM
Chen Yu-jung (陳昱榮) is a Taiwanese artist with a background in multimedia music composition. He creates experimental and improvisational performances as well as mixed media installations that focus on the interaction between sight and sound in space. Chen’s works often incorporate ready-made objects and other collected material that accentuate the subtle details of daily life through an emotional narrative. In his current solo exhibition Sound Interstice — Scape of Flow (音間隙—流動的風) at Taipei Artist Village, Chen presents a body of new works that extend from Scape of Flow, a project that he had begun during his residency in New Zealand last year. He explores the complexity of city spaces and how they are built through layers of memories, histories and transformations. “Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist ... an invisible landscape conditions the visible one,” Chen quotes the 20th century Italian writer Italo Calvino in his exhibition preface. Inspired by the idea of invisible cities, Chen takes recordings of city soundscapes collected during his residency and attempts to translate them into images. Objects presented in the show act as carriers of sound that detect their physical relationship with the gallery room.
■ Barry Room, Taipei Artist Village (台北國際藝術村百里廳), 7 Beiping E Rd, Taipei City (台北市北平東路7號), tel: (02) 3393-7377. Open Tuesday to Sunday from 11am to 9pm
■ Until July 21
Photo Courtesy of Theatre Madam Bach
BCS Summer Open Day & Recipe About Art (竹圍工作室夏季開放日+《藝態食譜/補》食物藝術影像展) is a series of workshops, screenings, talks and exhibitions at Bamboo Curtain Studio with an emphasis on environmentally conscious works. The exhibition title includes the Chinese term Pu (譜), which is associated with visual notation of music as well as cuisine recipes. Drawing from this cross section between sound and taste, the show seeks to explore cultural expressions that embody unique local knowledge and traditional sensibilities. Chen Jen-pei’s (程仁珮) The Next Meal (下一餐) is an installation based on Keelung, an important harbor where many local industries depend on the resources of the ocean. The work includes interviews with local fishermen as well as field studies of the area’s environmental conditions and its relation to food production. Chen extends her observations of Keelung by creating a narrative about the future of food that brings out global issues we may face in the future. Lo Sheng-wen’s (羅晟文) TUNA is a video game in which the player is encouraged to catch as much yellow fin tuna fish as possible. The work seeks to draw attention to the nearly threatened status of the tuna species and issues of ecological sustainability in human food production.
■ Bamboo Curtain Studio (竹圍工作室), 39, Ln 88, Jhongjheng E Rd Sec 2, New Taipei City (新北市中正東路二段88巷39號), tel: (02) 8809-3809. Visit bambooculture.com/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=149 for more information.
■ Through June 30
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Artist villlage
An exhibition of the legendary American comic strip Garfield is currently on view at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (中正紀念堂). Created by Jim Davis in 1978, Garfield is the world’s most widely syndicated comic strip in history, according to the Guinness World Record. Starring a witty, mischievous domestic cat and his companions, the series has won the hearts of many readers around the globe. The international popularity of the comic remains strong throughout the years, spawning a series of films in the early 2000s and a creatively dubbed version for broadcast in Taiwan via Cartoon Network in 2010. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the comic strip, the exhibition features original drawings from Davis, a replica of the author’s studio and 20 action figures based on characters in the story. In addition, 20 Garfield-inspired works by Taiwanese and Hong Kong artists have been specially commissioned for the show.
■ Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (中正紀念堂) 21, Zhongshan S Rd, Taipei City (台北市中山路21號), tel: (02) 2343 1100. Open daily from 10am to 6pm
■ Until Sept. 15
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