Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou (周杰倫) is to curate Sotheby’s first “Contemporary Curated: Asia” auction, to take place in Hong Kong next month, the international auction company said yesterday.
The auction series, titled “Jay Chou x Sotheby’s,” is to feature “exceptional works by blue-chip artists and rising stars handpicked by Jay to be offered in a highly anticipated evening sale on June 18” and an online day sale, the company said in a statement.
Sotheby’s described Chou as an avid art collector who is well known for incorporating elements of fine art, poetry and classical styles into his work.
Photo: Kuan Chen, Taipei Times
The 42-year-old Taiwanese, who has sold more than 30 million records and is known as the “King of Mandopop,” has established a growing reputation as an art collector over the past few years, the statement said.
“I have always believed in the power of art — a medium of expression that sees no boundary or limitation. It isn’t something you need to try to get close to — by nature, it envelops our life each and every day,” Chou said.
Florence Ho (何詩慧), who is a specialist/cataloguer in Sotheby’s contemporary art department, praised Chou for his vision in music and art, saying that this groundbreaking auction would definitely show the power of Asian art to the world.
The “Jay Chou x Sotheby’s” auction event is also to have an online day sale from June 10 to June 22, the statement said.
The evening sale is to be led by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled, an iconic work from 1985 that was featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine that year.
Chou has also selected three stage costumes from his 2016-2018 “The Invincible” world tour to be sold during the auction event to benefit charity, the statement added.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two