1. Fashionable art
Winning hands down is the exhibition that surpassed attendance records and that is the retrospective of Vivienne Westwood's fashion designs. From the glitzy celebrity-studded opening to its weekend hours-long queues, this exhibition showed how to be both provocative and a blockbuster. Now, that's a hard act to follow.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TFAM
2. Give me the facts, ma'am and nothing but the facts
The Taipei Fine Arts Museum's press department is unequaled. TFAM provides journalists with timely information detailing the "who, what, where and when," which is mind-bogglingly absent in most press kits.
3. The global village
This summer's Taiwan Pavilion titled "The Spectre of Freedom" at the Venice Biennale was curated by Jason Wang Chia-chi (王嘉驥) and showed that Taiwan's artists can easily hold a candle to their international peers.
4. It's all in the details
The Lake: Towards a Cross-Cultural Dialogue, at the Taipei Artist Village, was organized by photographer Yeh Weili (葉偉立) showed that extremely well thought-out organization from start to finish pays off. Not only did the exhibition have a dynamic installation to showcase photos, to listen to experimental music and to read creative writing, it also opened with a night of poetry and music.
5. Community art
Public art that engages the local community and helps members feel proud of their neighborhoods was most notably seen in the second Taipei Public Art Festival of the Dihua Sewage Treatment Plant, and Tainan's Hai-an Road of painted building facades.
6. Digital art rules
Taichung's National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts hosted an exhibition of Ars Electronica's award-winning digital works, organized by local curating team Unison 8 who put on a snazzy display. Additionally, this year the National Culture and Arts Foundation created its first Techno Art Creation Project that gives funding to artists to create digital projects.
7. Thinking outside the box
Taipei MOMA exhibited Taiwanese contemporary art not in the gallery, but at the Director General of the British Trade and Cultural Office's residence, thus bringing local art to a different audience.
8. Read a good book
This was an exceptional year for curator Jason Wang Chia-chi. Besides curating the show in Venice, his Variation Xanadu, on view at MOCA looked to Coleridge's Kubla Khan for inspiration and displayed hypnotic videos from a wide range of artists. Chen Chieh-jen (陳界仁) created a new film for this exhibition, while Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's underwater scenes and Hiraki Sawa's miniature scale jets created contemplative new worlds.
9. An earful of art
The B!AS International Sound Art Exhibition at TFAM curated by artists Wang Jun-Jieh (王俊傑) and Huang Wen-Hao (黃文浩) brought together 10 experimental sound artists, highlighted by Maywa Denki's (掇明和電機) wacky performance at Luxy nighclub.
10. Auld lang syne
And ending the year was a small, rueful exhibition by Lin Chuan-chu (林銓居), showing that traditional Chinese ink painting is still contemporary and that creating memoir-style art can still strike a deep chord within the viewer.
“China wants to unify with Taiwan at the lowest possible cost, and it currently believes that unification will become easier and less costly as time passes,” wrote Amanda Hsiao (蕭嫣然) and Bonnie Glaser in Foreign Affairs (“Why China Waits”) this month, describing how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is playing the long game in its quest to seize Taiwan. This has been a favorite claim of many writers over the years, easy to argue because it is so trite. Very obviously, if the PRC isn’t attacking Taiwan, it is waiting. But for what? Hsiao and Glaser’s main point is trivial,
Taiwan’s overtaking of South Korea in GDP per capita is not a temporary anomaly, but the result of deeper structural problems in the South Korean economy says Chang Young-chul, the former CEO of Korea Asset Management Corp. Chang says that while it reflects Taiwan’s own gains, it also highlights weakening growth momentum in South Korea. As design and foundry capabilities become more important in the AI era, Seoul risks losing competitiveness if it relies too heavily on memory chips. IMF forecasts showing Taiwan widening its lead over South Korea have fueled debate in Seoul over memory chip dependence, industrial policy and
May 18 to May 24 Gathered on Yangtou Mountain (羊頭山) on Dec. 5, 1972, Taiwan’s hiking enthusiasts formally declared the formation of the “100 Peaks Club” (百岳俱樂部) and unveiled the final list of mountains. Famed mountaineer Lin Wen-an (林文安) led this effort for the Chinese Alpine Association (中華山岳協會). Working with other experienced climbers, he chose 100 peaks above 10,000 feet (3,048m) that featured triangulation points and varied in difficulty and character. The list sparked an alpine hiking craze, inspiring many to take up mountaineering and competing to “conquer” the summits. A common misconception is that the 100 Peaks represent Taiwan’s 100 tallest
Yesterday, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) nominated legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) as their Taipei mayoral candidate, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) put their stamp of approval on Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) as their candidate for Changhua County commissioner and former legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has begun the process to also run in Changhua, though she has not yet been formally nominated. All three news items are bizarre. The DPP has struggled with settling on a Taipei nominee. The only candidate who declared interest was Enoch Wu (吳怡農), but the party seemed determined to nominate anyone
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