A large lantern commissioned by the Taipei City Government to be displayed during next month’s Taipei Lantern Festival has drawn the ire of Internet users, with many calling the decoration “ugly.”
Lin Shu-min (林書民), the artist who created the piece, told a news conference on Wednesday last week that the 14.2m lantern is a cross between a monkey and a gourd, which is seen in Chinese-speaking communities as an auspicious symbol for people who want to have children.
The monkey has a red face and a bright yellow body, with images of a goldfish and a peach — both auspicious symbols — painted on its belly and back, and a gourd stem sticking out from the top of its head.
Photo courtesy of Taipei Department of Civil Affairs
The lantern was fleshed out from bubble foam sheets and is to be lit using a technique known as “light sculpture,” which would allow different patterns and animations to be projected onto its surface, Lin said.
The Taipei Department of Civil Affairs said that the lantern cost NT$9 million (US$267,459).
Netizens began criticizing the lantern soon after pictures of it were released online.
“This looks like a monkey wearing pantyhose,” a user named Harry Young said on YouTube.
“Do not try to fool me. This is totally [Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s] yellow rubber duck,” a YouTube user named Hsia Kuo-jen (夏國仁) said.
The lantern looks like the “bastard son of a monkey and a duck,” lawyer Lu Chiu-yuan (呂秋遠) wrote on Facebook.
Lin responded with modesty when asked by reporters to comment on the mounting criticism.
“I think that it is a great thing people are now paying more attention to issues related to arts and design,” he said.
Lin said that he got the inspiration for the monkey’s gourd-shaped body from the global trend of low birth rates.
The lantern can be seen at the Taipei Expo Park from Feb. 20 to Feb. 29.
It is not the first time design outsourced by the city government has come under fire from the public.
A Formosan black bear that was selected as the mascot for next year’s Summer Universiade in Taipei also sparked negative reviews.
The mascot was announced last year after going through three revisions, including a design by children’s show host Patty Hsu (徐千舜), which was paid for by the city government after it received the majority of votes on the city’s online polling platform, i-Voting.
Hsu’s design was later scrapped by the city government without explanation and the job to design a new mascot was given to Asia University professor of visual design Yu Ming-lung (游明龍), whose creation cost the city NT$2.88 million.
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
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the