A sculpture made of 2,800 empty beer bottles and wood from the river tamarind tree is to feature at this year’s Taiwan Lantern Festival, which begins on Tuesday next week in Pingtung County’s Dapeng Bay (大鵬灣).
The sculpture, which is 3m tall and 5m wide, lights up at night and is supported by a steel frame.
Each bottle is signed by a resident of Pingtung’s Hengchun Township (恆春), where the artist, Yang Tsung-hsun (楊宗熏), is based.
Photo: Tsai Tsung-hsien, Taipei Times
The sphere shape formed by the beer bottles is like a gigantic beehive, Yang said.
When the sculpture is lit up at night, it looks like a giant guangmingdeng (光明燈) — a small lamp lit by Taoists before Lunar New Year for good fortune in the coming year, he said.
The sculpture, which was commissioned by the Pingtung Cultural Affairs Department, is to also be exhibited in Hengchun Township after the festival ends, he said.
Born in Hengchun Township’s Dehe Borough (德和), Yang often uses the river tamarind in his work.
His works have previously helped Dehe Borough win a Yuan Ye Award for architectural landscape.
He decided to use the green bottles that Taiwan Tobacco & Liquor Corp uses for its Gold Medal Taiwan Beer after discussing the idea with Danish artists Rikke Juellund and Mikael Fock, Yang said.
He had been worried that it would be difficult to gather the number of empty bottles he needed within such a short period of time, but he was able to collect the empty bottles within a few days, he said.
The company should commend him or even “adopt” the sculpture, he added.
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