More than 100 paintings on tree bark by Australian Aborigines are on display in Taipei.
The Old Masters: Australia’s Great Bark Artists — 134 works of mostly tree bark paintings and clay figurines — opened on Friday at the National Taiwan Museum in Zhongzheng District (中正).
The works come primarily from the Arnhem Land region of Australia’s Northern Territory, the traditional home of the Yolngu people, said Margo Neale, senior curator of the Indigenous Knowledge Centre at the National Museum of Australia, which helped organize the exhibition.
“It is a very highly sophisticated way of passing on culture that survives today. These bark paintings are like messages on note paper, where you write information to tell other people things,” Neale said.
The paintings are like encyclopedias, because they hold the identity of the artist, she said, adding that if a person is knowledgeable enough, they can see the information embedded in the paintings.
Neale said that Djan’kawu Cross Back to the Mainland, painted by Djunmal in 1966, describes a mythical story of two sisters who came to Australia and dug holes in to provide the land with irrigation water.
“If you look, you can see the water holes and the digging sticks, and all of these different patterns refer to salt or fresh water and mud plains,” Neale said. “So it’s a geographical map of a particular coast at the top of Australia.”
The Aboriginal communities of Taiwan and Australia have closely related anthropology and genetics, Deputy Minister of Culture Hsiao Tsung-huang (蕭宗煌) said.
“The National Taiwan Museum and the National Museum of Australia are extremely proud to present this exhibition with the highest respect to Aboriginal communities,” he said.
When the exhibition ends on Feb. 9 next year, the works of art are to be returned to Australia.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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