The Chiayi Performing Arts Center on Saturday last week opened an exhibition on traditional Vietnamese cross-stitch embroidery and ao dai dresses to highlight the experience of Vietnamese spouses in Taiwan.
The exhibition, which is to run through Oct. 21, is a collaboration between filmmaker Nguyen Kim-hong (阮金紅) and fashion designer Wu Ching-ching (武清清), both of whom became Taiwanese through marriage.
Ao dai is the formal dress worn by Vietnamese women, typically made of silk with a high slit and worn over a matching pair of trousers, Nguyen said, adding that she and her friends and family made the dresses under Wu’s direction.
Photo: Lin Yi-chang, Taipei Times
The exhibition seeks to shed light on immigrant women’s experience from childhood to motherhood via embroidery and to create a space where people of all ethnicities can appreciate Vietnamese culture, she said.
The dresses are embroidered with images of the Taipei 101, cherry blossoms of Alishan (阿里山) and Taiwanese sanheyuan (三合院) houses, as well as Vietnam’s floating markets and Ha Long Bay.
To mark the exhibit’s opening, 10 students from the Sieh Chih Vocational High School’s fashion design, performance art and childcare departments modeled the dresses.
“The dress makes me feel that my posture is more elegant and the silk is very comfortable to wear,” model Chen Yu-hsuan (陳祐瑄) said.
“I am glad to represent the school and Taiwan in this event, and to help facilitate cultural exchanges between the two countries,” she said.
Chiayi County Deputy Commissioner Jeff Wu (吳芳銘) said that about 12,000 of Chiayi’s residents are new immigrants, including about 3,600 Vietnamese women.
The exhibition should help in the development of cultural pluralism in the county and deepen the public’s understanding of Vietnamese culture, he said.
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