Taiwan will be featured at the Made in Asia art festival in Toulouse, France, later this month, with more than 30 Taiwanese performance groups and artists set to perform or exhibit their works for European audiences.
The annual art festival will be held in the southwestern French city this year from Wednesday -until Feb. 10.
The festival this year is one of the biggest to date and much bigger than last year’s show, which honored South Korea, said Chen Chih-cheng (陳志誠), the director of the Taiwan Culture Center in Paris.
Performance troupes set to appear include the Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters group, YiLab, the Shangchi Move Theatre, the Ten Drum Group, the Flying-Group Theater and Hsin Sing Nanguan.
Artists attending the festival include Taiwanese circus artist and modern dancer Huang Ming-cheng (黃明正), contemporary artists Tseng Yong Ning (曾雍甯), Yu Cheng-ta (余政達), Charwei Tsai (蔡佳葳), Chuang Che-wei (莊哲瑋) and Luo Jing-zhong (羅景中) and -photographer Wu Chi-tsung (吳季璁).
In addition, the Government Information Office will screen the films Buddha in God Man Dog (流浪神狗人) and A Place of One’s Own (一席之地) by young female director Singing Chen (陳芯宜) at the festival, and it has invited her to Toulouse to discuss her movies with the audience.
Other movies by young Taiwanese directors to be shown will be Beautiful Crazy (亂青春) by Lee Chi-yuarn (李啟源), Lee Kang-sheng’s (李康生) Help Me Eros (幫幫我愛神), and Chang Tso-chi’s (張作驥) Soul Of A Demon (蝴蝶).
Another component of the festival will be a calligraphy exhibition organized by Taiwanese publisher Hong Fei Cultures and featuring works by calligraphy masters Hsu Di-shan (許地山) and Shih Pei-chun (施佩君).
The works will be translated into French.
To coincide with the festival, many venues in Toulouse will be presenting Taiwanese art, including theaters, cultural centers, libraries, movie theaters and universities.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods