An exhibition of 12 outdoor installations on Saturday opened along Taitung County Road 197.
Some of the featured works include Taiwanese artist Sapod Kacaw’s Natural Healing (自然療癒), Taiwanese artist Jen Ta-hsian’s (任大賢) Dianguang Cow (電光牛), Finnish artist Jaakko Pernu’s Runway Droplet and German artist Jens Meyer’s Temple of Laundry.
The works are situated in Chihshang Township’s (池上) Wanan (萬安) and Jhensing (振興) villages, and Guanshan Township’s (關山) Dianguang Borough (電光).
Photo: CNA, courtesy of the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau
Those who travel along the road and its surroundings are likely to discover many secrets, local stories and Aboriginal influences, Wang Chih-hui (王志輝), director of the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau’s Taitung branch, said on Sunday.
The office organized the exhibition to help people understand the local people and their culture, he said.
The installations were created by 10 different artists from Taiwan, Finland, Germany, Turkey and Japan during a residency in the area, he said.
Photo courtesy of Kuo I-chun
Each work incorporates lines from Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry collection Stray Birds, so that when visitors look at them, it is as though they are reading his poems, he said.
Kuo Yi-chun (郭怡君), a Taitung County resident, said that although she typically takes Provincial Highway No. 9 to travel through the county’s valleys, she took the slower County Road 197 to see the installations.
Many of the installations require viewers to walk into the communities, she said, adding that in doing so she discovered the beauty of the road’s surrounding areas.
Pan Pao-ying (潘寶瑩), chairwoman of a development association in Dianguang Borough, said that she has noticed a sharp increase in the number of visitors to the borough since the exhibition opened.
There have been so many visitors that she has thought about bringing the borough’s residents together to set up stalls to sell bottled water, sausages and local agricultural products to visitors to increase the community’s income, she said.
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