Taipei’s Museum of Contemporary Art opened an exhibition in a city Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) station yesterday that featured artworks made of unwanted and scrap materials from neighboring auto parts shops.
The month-long event, titled “Trash as Treasure,” is the second of a three-part community exhibition project following a previous show titled “Hair Design with No Hair,” in which the museum cooperated with nearby hair salons. The theme of the third exhibition has yet to be decided.
“The first of the series was a great success,” museum executive director Shih Jui-jen (石瑞仁) said.
“We hope the second one will also be successful. We’d like passers by to slow down and take their time to enjoy art,” Shih said.
It is the 28th exhibition the museum has organized in the underground area at Zhongshan MRT station. The continually changing displays have turned the area into a place where “people can relax and enjoy contemporary art,” Shih noted.
Among the seven artists displaying their work in the exhibition is Lin Ming-shiou, who has been a mechanic for 20 years and only started to create his own art in 2008.
Inspired by the items he sees in his daily life, ranging from insects and animals to people and appliances, Lin said he wanted to “breathe life into scrap and even keep it as a souvenir.”
Taking one of the 13 items on display — a robot sculpture — as an example, he said the piece is made of parts from a 1974 Volkswagen T2 Kombi Camper.
“It is a good way to keep a part of something you really love,” he said.
Three workshops have also been scheduled to attract more crowds to the exhibition, including garden lamp-making, silhouette printing and making accessories with cast-off clothes, the organizers said.
The exhibition will run until Aug. 14.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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