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
The Taiwan of yesteryear was dominated in whole or in part by the Dutch, Spanish, Qing Empire and Japanese. But is the Taiwanese name for a popular edible fish derived from the Portuguese language? Cheng Wei-chung (鄭維中), an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Taiwan History, says yes. The fish in question is the narrow-barred Spanish mackerel, which was listed in early 18th century Qing local gazetteers as Taiwanese specialities alongside milk fish and mullet, according to Cheng’s paper, “Mullet, narrow-barred Spanish mackerel and milkfish: Multiple contextual developments of three certified seafood specilaities in Taiwan, from the
Aug. 10 to Aug. 16 They called him the “No Problem Doctor” (沒關係醫生) because that’s what he always told his patients when they couldn’t pay up. Operating the only clinic in Changhua County’s Pusin Township (埔心) during the 1950s, Hsu Tsai-chih (許再枝) knew that life was difficult in his remote hometown. “They barely had enough to survive, so it was pointless to chase after them for the money,” an 81-year-old Hsu told the United Daily News in 2002. “I just went with the flow, some offered to pay me back years later but I had already forgotten
I didn’t expect to spend more than three minutes out of my car, yet the sun was so brutal I put on my hat before approaching the seawall. Beimen (北門) is the flattest and most sun-baked part of Tainan. It lacks trees and people. In wintertime, the weather is often delightful. It wasn’t yet mid-morning in the hot season, however, and I felt like a leaf shriveling in the desert. Atop the seawall but facing inland, I could see dozens of the rectangular ponds which account for a significant percentage of Beimen’s “land” area. Some, no doubt, were dug to produce
In the regular drumbeat of arrests of alleged Chinese spies, one case last month stood out. It did not involve the US or another rival of China, but Russia, whose security services accused a prominent arctic scientist of selling classified data on technologies for detecting submarines. Meanwhile a court in Kazakhstan in October convicted the Central Asia nation’s preeminent China specialist of espionage, a move widely interpreted at the time as a warning against increased meddling by the superpower next door. Both men maintain their innocence and if China is spying on Russia, Moscow is surely doing the same. Even so, the fact
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