Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei (台北當代藝術館, MOCA, Taipei), Once Upon A Time (少年當代─未終結的過去進行式) is a cross-generational exhibition about contemporary art from a humanitarian perspective. The exhibition asks: What kind of life stories, daily events, environments or attitudes have contributed to individual art practices and artistic ways of thinking? The show highlights coming-of-age experiences and their historical context — how social and political climates have affected individual processes of becoming. Leo Liu (劉秋兒) is an artist and activist concerned with labor issues. His archival work, Is Resistance Beautiful?, is a series of photographs and documents about social issues and his action-based art practice, examining aesthetics in relation to activism and performance. Shuy Ruey-Shiann (徐瑞憲) is a Taipei-born artist who creates kinetic sculptures and installations about human life and the environment through the perspective of a machine. Nine Dreams — Hopscotch (九個夢—跳格子) is an installation that contains imaginative clues about the 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 Oct. 13
Photo Courtesy of Powen Gallery
The Middleman, The Backpacker, The Alien Species, and The Time Traveler (留洋四鏢客) is a group show at TKG+ Projects that explores the trajectory of globalization through the four characters mentioned in the title. A particular kind of middleman in Asia known as the Dan Bang Ke (單幫客) came to rise in the early 20th century, a time marked by burgeoning signs of globalization. The Dan Bang Ke were loners who traveled abroad and returned with foreign merchandise for sale — clothes, medicine, cosmetics and so on. This led to the opening of shops for imported goods during the 70s and 80s. After the Cold War, according to the exhibition text, backpackers replaced the Dan Bang Ke as globetrotters who continued to wander the world while fostering a distinct culture of co-observation and participation. The show also considers the perspective of an alien species as well as a time traveler who embodies fictional movements throughout time and space.
■ 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 National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
Luo He-lin (羅禾淋) is a Taipei-based artist who works at the intersection of technology and cross-disciplinary art. His experience as a gamer informs his explorations of virtual reality and Internet migration. If This is a Global Surveillance Center (如果這是全球監控中心) relates to the rising power of global surveillance in today’s age of the cloud computing. In three parts, it proposes ways of reversing this trend: a method of exposing the IP location of surveillance cameras; the physical location of the cameras and services; and directing the surveillance system to a staged presentation of a text, titled: “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” by American writer and activity John Perry Barlow.
■ 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 TKG+ Projects
Wu Chia-yun (吳家昀) is a Taiwanese artist with a background in visual communication and film studies. She creates narrative films, videos and moving image installations that address the nature of film and the human condition. Her works are often poetic and experimental, and travel the boundaries between narrative and non-narrative frameworks. Wu is keen on observing life from a philosophical point of view through multimedia works. Her solo exhibition, Darkness Within Darkness (空), is a digital film translated into a physical format of 24 frames per second. The film reel is then manipulated through scanning and printing different paper textures. Wu’s interest in this process lies in the physicality of the film reel and the formlessness of the original digital file.
■ 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. 29
Photo Courtesy of MOCA Taipei
Currently on view at Powen Gallery (紅野畫廊) is a solo exhibition by Chen Han-sheng (陳漢聲). Chen is a multidisciplinary artist born into a family of farmers. Seeking to find a connection between their life and his own, his projects have explored agricultural and artistic labor practices, which he does in After the Explosion (牆隔神農), an exhibition that explores the relationship between the petrochemical industry in Kaohsiung and its negative environmental effects on farming.
■ Powen Gallery (紅野畫廊), 11, Ln 164, Songjiang Rd, Taipei (臺北市松江路164巷11號), tel: (02) 2523-6009. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 7pm.
■ Until Aug. 18
This month it was revealed that China has been telling US officials that the Taiwan Strait is not an international waterway, but China’s territorial waters. “China has sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction over the Taiwan Straits,” the Global Times thundered last week. The slow, inexorable expansion of China’s territorial claims by land and sea signals that once Taiwan is annexed, this problem of Chinese expansionism will only become more dire. As a solid explainer from The Interpreter observed last year, China treats “territorial waters” as sovereign waters: “China’s interpretation of the territorial sea is that the state has the exclusive
June 20 to June 26 After enduring nearly a decade of abuse, 22-year-old Teng Ju-wen (鄧如雯) killed her husband Lin A-chi (林阿棋) during his sleep in October 1993. Teng was forced to marry Lin after he raped her when she was 13, and over the years he not only regularly beat her, but also terrorized her family and at one point stuck the heads of their two sons into a running washing machine during a fit of anger. Teng ran away for a few months after a particularly nasty incident, but returned after Lin smashed up her parents house and threatened
In the space of a few decades, Taiwan has changed from a place where characterful old buildings were thoughtlessly bulldozed to make space for wider roads or bigger homes, to a society much more likely to cherish physical reminders of the past. The authorities have poured money into restoration and renovation work. According to a Nov. 10, 2020 post on Tainan City Government’s Municipal Administration of Cultural Heritage Web site, in the first nine months of 2020, the Ministry of Culture’s (MOC) Bureau of Cultural Heritage approved 13 such projects in the southern city, setting a total budget of NT$281.6 million.
The greatest worry Ma Yu-chuan (馬幼娟) has about death is not properly saying farewell to a loved one. And she should know. The practising Muslim recalls that she had a falling out with her father when she was in college. One night he tried to make amends, but she angrily rebuffed him. He died in a car accident the next day. “Why do we fear death?” is among the many questions posed in the first corridor at the Museum of World Religions (世界宗教博物館) in New Taipei City, where Ma serves as director. There is no correct answer, she says, but
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