A contemporary Aboriginal music exhibition opened on Friday at Taitung’s National Museum of Prehistory to educate the public on the history and suffering of Taiwan’s Aborigines through music.
The opening was attended by Aboriginal singers Hu Te-fu (胡德夫), Chen Ming-jen (陳明仁) and Lu Ching-tzu (盧靜子).
Apart from communicating with the public and responding to topics pertaining to Aboriginal transitional justice, the museum hopes the exhibition would allow more people to understand the history and pain of Aborigines, museum director Lee Yu-fen (李玉芬) said.
Photo: Chang Tsun-wei, Taipei Times
Exhibition curator Lu Mei-fen (盧梅芬) said that she hopes people would empathize with Aborigines and perceive these issues as common concerns, because it is the only way people can truly understand the Aboriginal community.
The exhibition features nearly 200 vinyl records, CDs and cassette tapes from the Japanese colonial era and after World War II, many of which are rare and discontinued collectibles.
Among them are the musical works of White Terror victim Kao Yi-sheng (高一生), late Puyuma musicians Lu Sen-pao (陸森寶) and Chen Shih (陳實), Paiwan singer Hu and Amis singer Lu Ching-tzu.
Some of these works speak to social issues, such as Hu’s song Why (為什麼), which was inspired by the 1984 Haishan mining disaster in what is now New Taipei City’s Tucheng District (土城).
The majority of the items were provided by Taiwanese music collector and cocurator Hsu Jui-kai (許睿楷), as well as vinyl collector Hsu Teng-fang (徐登芳).
The exhibition also includes Taiwan Hao (台灣好) — a short anti-communist campaign film that uses Aboriginal melodies as background music — historical sources on Aboriginal social movements, documentaries and others.
The exhibition, titled “The Solace of Music: Shared Memories of Contemporary Taiwanese Indigenous Songs,” runs until March 8 next year.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching