An exhibition commemorating the 100th birthday of Japanese illustrator Chihiro Iwasaki opened at the R79 Eslite Underground book street in Taipei’s Zhongshan District (中山) on Saturday.
The I Dreamed a Dream exhibition features a 64m display of some of Iwasaki’s drawings selected by author Chang Hsi (張西) and illustrator Inca Pan (潘昀珈).
The drawings depict children, animals, the moon and other elements commonly found in her illustrations for classic fairy tales and stories, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Thumbelina, Blue Bird, The Little Mermaid and The Crane Maiden.
Photo courtesy of Eslite Bookstore
The drawings are tied together by the themes of “daydreaming” and “sleepwalking.”
Fifteen new Iwasaki-inspired poems by Shuntaro Tanikawa are exhibited alongside 15 of her drawings.
There is also a children’s room created by Japan’s Torafu Architects, where children and adults can draw together.
Photo: Chen Yu-hsun, Taipei Times
The organizers want to share good international work with local children, creating an environment that encourages love and reading, and hope that visitors will be moved by the beauty of innocence, curator Lin Hsuan-ying (林萱穎) said.
Iwasaki’s illustrations are always surrounded by a sort of “moving glow” and leave room for interpretation, allowing readers to lose themselves in stories, Pan said.
People think that picture books are for children, but they can also have meaning for adults, because every adult was once a child, said Takeshi Matsumoto, Iwasaki’s son and the founder of the Chihiro Art Museums in Tokyo and Azumino, Japan, on Saturday.
Matsumoto said he hoped the drawings would inspire viewers to remember their dreams as a child.
The exhibition runs until Nov. 11.
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