C&G Art Group consists of French and Taiwanese artists Chiu Chieh-sen (邱杰森) and Margot Guillemot. Focusing on digital technology, the team is interested in exploring patterns of cultural development and aims to digitally reconstruct urban landscapes using the memories of its inhabitants. Chiu’s cross-disciplinary background includes contemporary art, traditional craft and architectural history. Guillemot, on the hand, works specifically with digital technology and addresses in her work the relationship between reality and virtual reality, perception and cognition. I/O Landscape (開/關 地景), on view at VT Art Salon (非常廟藝文空間), presents Remake Landscape (風景再製), a new project in collaboration with the Industrial Technology Research Institute (工業技術研究院). The multimedia project examines the relationship between humans and landscapes in contemporary society. Working between the seen and the unseen, C&G Art Group offers original insights into urban environments as well as new body perceptions that bridge the gap between the digital and physical.
■ VT Art Salon (非常廟藝文空間), B1, 47 Yitong St, Taipei City (台北市伊通街47號B1), tel: (02) 2516-1060. Open Tuesdays to Thursdays from 1:30pm to 9pm, and Fridays and Saturdays from 1:30pm to 10pm
■ Until Aug. 10
Photo courtesy of Project Fulfill Art Space
How Real Is Yesterday (昨日有多真實) is a solo exhibition by Taipei-based artist Kuo Yu-Ping (郭俞平) at TKG+ Projects. Kuo creates poetic narratives with video, installation, painting and performance that draw on the idea of collective consciousness in society, culture and politics. The gallery describes her work as “a personal identity project where the lack of identity raises titillating tension” and likens her show to a dream-like park where each art piece softly whispers. Kuo reflects on her childhood memories of home, which she associates with intense heat and unbearable melancholy. Double Reading (雙重閱讀) is a video that includes footage of ceremonial guards, which the artist associates with the notion of self-censorship. Delay and Pit (延遲與凹洞) is a single channel video installation that analyzes how structural changes in politics influence national developments in the course of modernization. The show also includes a piece of carpet that Kuo has been dismantling over the last three years, loosening the wool and transforming it into pom-poms.
■ 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 Sept. 8
Photo Courtesy of TKG Plus
Anxiety of Images (影像焦慮) is a selection of works from the collection of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (國立台灣美術館) about imaging technology, photography and the anxiety that results from a culture of gazing. The show begins with portraits and landscapes that suggest the ways in which photography has been impacted by new digital imaging technologies. This section addresses digitally enabled, creative acts that surpass the limitations of non-digital photography, including flexible modifications of time and space as well as new ways of reading and communicating with images. As the museum writes, the once significant belief “seeing is perceiving” is gradually being replaced with a curiosity for new ways of seeing. The exhibition’s second section tackles concerns about surveillance and governance in relation to image making. The issues of state monitoring are by no means a novel issue, writes the museum; however, technology is enabling such acts to become more subtle, undetectable and seemingly tolerable without the overtly intrusive presence of the camera lens.
■ National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (國立台灣美術館), 2, Wuquan W Rd Sec 1, Taichung City (台中市五權西路一段2號), tel: (04) 2373-3552. Open Tuesdays to Fridays from 9am to 5pm, Saturdays and Sundays from 9am to 6pm
■ Until Sept. 22
Photo courtesy of National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
Thai video artist Kawita Vatanajyankur currently has a solo show on at Project Fulfill Art Space (就在藝術空間) and co-organized by Bangkok gallery Nova Contemporary. Vatanajyankur creates luscious images inspired by the manual labor of Thai women. Performing such methods in her videos, the artist examines body vulnerability as related to labor, tools, consumption and feminism. The Repetitiveness of Work (勞動動態) features two of Vatanajyankur’s video series, created in 2017 and last year. In the first series, Work, the artist imitates motions such as repetitive lifting and lowering a fishing line, or an increasing accumulation of weights on a scale. In this process, Vatanajyankur works in a choreographed manner while testing the limits of her physical abilities. In the second video series, Performing Textiles, the artist extends her performative interpretations of tools by focusing solely on machines used in textile manufacturing. Vatanajyankur’s work is poetic and savage, while exploring the cultural significance of the female form, and values pertaining to labor and equality.
■ Project Fulfill Art Space (就在藝術空間), 2, Alley 45, Ln 147, Xinyi Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市信義路三段147巷45弄2號), tel: (02) 2707-6942. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 1pm to 6pm
■ Until Aug. 31
Gene Paul Martin is a Manila-born artist who is frustrated with the lack of vitality in today’s visual language. Through painting, Martin seeks to break out of conventional frameworks by creating “bold and rich color and unscrupulous visual content,” writes Nunu Fine Art. The gallery is currently hosting Martin’s solo exhibition Do You Do It? Or Does It Do It (你創造它?它創造自己?), which features surreal paintings that are a chaotic assembly of images drawn from his imagination or observation. Martin says painting is a mechanism to produce an independent perspective in spite of the trials he has faced throughout his life.
■ 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 Aug. 3
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