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
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