Tsong Pu (莊普) is known for creating meticulous geometric paintings. His signature method of composition is to organize arrangements of color fields using one-centimeter squared grids. Although abstract and minimal, the works reference histories, sentiments and perspectives that relate to relationships between man, nature and the world. Tsong’s solo exhibition, Illusions of the Universe (幻覺的宇宙), features new paintings on canvas, watercolor drawings and installations created in the last two years. The title of the show refers to the artist’s interest in studying physical phenomena, such as analyses of light, reflection and material.
■ Eslite Gallery (誠品畫廊), 5F, 11 Songgao Rd, Taipei City (台北市松高路11號5樓), tel: (02) 8789-3388. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Tomorrow; until Nov. 17
Photo Courtesy of Bluerider Art
Mind Set Art Center (安卓藝術) presents Appearances under Erasure (擦抹情境), a solo exhibition by Juin Shieh (謝鴻均). Shieh’s drawings and paintings are intimately connected with her personal life experiences, intellectual enquiries and explorations about the social structure of contemporary society. In her studio, the artist maintains a meditative process of manipulating surfaces, creating forceful strokes, then smudging or erasing them as a means for reconstruction. The exhibition includes pictures inspired by her studies of grass fields while taking her family dog on walks in the countryside. She contemplates the cycle of life found in the wilderness and in man-made environments, seeking to grasp the dialectical relationships between man, nature and the universe.
■ Mind Set Art Center (安卓藝術) 180, Heping E Rd, Taipei City (台北市和平東路180號), tel: (02) 2365-6008. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 11am to 6pm
■ Tomorrow; until Nov. 30
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Contemporary Art Center
The 26th edition of Taipei’s long running contemporary art fair, Art Taipei (台北國際藝術博覽會), kicks off today. The fair will feature 141 international and local galleries, with a thematic focus on the reproduction of light. According to the fair’s press release, light is a metaphor for infinite possibilities and a fundamental sign of creation. In addition to the anticipated gallery presentations, the fair will also include a retrospective of Taiwanese modern art after the end of martial law, and a section — MIT — that is dedicated to showcasing young local talent.
■ Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall 1 (台北世貿中心展覽1館), 5, Sec 5, Xinyi Rd, Taipei City (台北市信義五段5號), tel: (02) 2659-0798. Open today from 2 to 7pm, tomorrow and Sunday from 11 am to 7pm, and Monday from 11 am to 6pm
■ Today until Monday
Photo Courtesy of Mindset Art Center
This year marks the 100th anniversary of Bauhaus, a pioneering school of applied arts and architecture that operated in Weimar and subsequently Dessau, Germany between the two world wars. As part of its internationally traveling program, Virtual Bauhaus (虛擬包浩斯) will be opening today at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (關渡美術館). The show is a recreation of the school’s building in Dessau, through which visitors can walk and experience its iconic modern architecture and design.
■ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (關渡美術館), 1 Xueyuan Rd, Taipei City (台北市學園路1號), tel: (02) 2896-1000 X 2432. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 5pm
■ Until Jan. 5
Photo Courtesy of Eslite Gallery
Beatrice Glow is an interdisciplinary artist working in a variety of mediums, including performance, painting, experiential technology, olfactory art and video. For Flowers and Forts, currently on view at Taipei Contemporary Art Center (台北當代藝術中心), Glow presents a series of video works, prints on silk and parts of her ongoing research project between Mannahatta (today’s Manhattan) and Rhun of the Banda Islands in Indonesia. Both islands share traces of traumatic pasts under European colonization and were exchanged by the Dutch and English in 1667. Glow’s research revolves around the wild flowers growing around historical forts, which suggests a narrative of exploitation, regeneration and resilience.
■ Taipei Contemporary Art Center (台北當代藝術中心), 11, Ln 49, Baoan St, Taipei City (保安街49巷11號), tel: (02) 2550-1231. Open Tuesday to Sunday from 1pm to 7pm
■ Until Nov. 10
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
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby