Frogs attack her when she sleeps. An elementary school student obsessed with dinosaurs disrupts the classes she tries to teach, and a friend’s co-worker smells like dried squid when menstruating.
Chang Chiung-fang (張瓊方), winner of Taiwan’s first online Young Art Award, takes as her subject matter personal experience and emotions in much the same way as better-known expressionist painters she admires, including Edward Munch, Jean Dubuffet and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Munch, Dubuffet and Basquiat dealt with issues like mortality and alienation. Chang faces problems more pertinent to a 26-year-old Taiwanese city girl, such as nightmares of giant amphibians beating her up.
“I just paint what I’m feeling,” Chang said in Taipei last week after being coaxed out from behind the director of TOSEE Art gallery (吐思藝術), where she has two consecutive solo exhibitions running through June 27. “It’s a record of my mood at the time, like a diary.”
TOSEE will also display paintings by Chang at the second edition of Young Art Taipei, an art fair that runs from tomorrow to Sunday at the Sunworld Dynasty Hotel (台北王朝大酒店).
Taiwan Contemporary Art Link, an association of four Taipei galleries that organizes the exhibition, hopes the event will attract even more than the 4,000 people who attended last year. The artwork is limited to that made by artists under 45 years old, but older visitors are welcome and a Sunworld receptionist confirmed that all the exhibition rooms are wheelchair accessible.
Fifty-seven exhibitors — up from 42 at the fair’s debut — will fill the Sunworld’s ninth floor with “young, vivid and affordable” art from Taiwan, Japan and China, with three more galleries, one each from Hong Kong, South Korea and Spain. This year’s chief organizer, Valen Cheng (鄭恂恂) of Aki Gallery (也趨藝廊), says costs are kept low for potential buyers and for participating galleries.
“One of the characteristics and advantages of hotel art fairs is that galleries can reduce accommodation expenses by having their staff sleep in the exhibition room,” Cheng said. “They just have to move the artwork off the bed when they go to sleep and move it back the next morning.”
Michael Chen (陳錫文), who participated at last year’s fair as a Julia Gallery (雅逸藝術中心) staff member, and then left to open TOSEE in October last year, says the fair “goes beyond selling art — it’s more about attracting people with a new way of showing work.”
“Last year all kinds of people you usually don’t see at galleries showed up, very young people,” Chen said. “It’s not like the typical opening with big bosses in fancy suits ... People come in blue jeans or shorts.”
Professional art sellers still need to make money, however, and organizers introduced an “800 USD Affordable Art Campaign” this year to tempt potential buyers on a budget.
The online Young Art Award is also new. Between March 20 and April 10, Chang’s Green received 3,760 votes, beating out 52 other works.
Although online polls can be unreliable, Chang said she won fair and square.
“My parents are businesspeople and have a lot of colleagues,” she said. “My mom got really into it. She made little cards showing the Internet address and the number of my painting and handed them out to everyone she works with.”
And the prize?
“Nothing. They just announce, ‘The winner is ...’ and that’s it. No money.”
That said, red “sold” stickers graced five labels next to Chang’s works at TOSEE as of Sunday, a week after her show opened — not bad for someone who didn’t focus on painting until she was a junior at National Taiwan University of Arts and won’t formally finish her graduate studies there until later this month.
In the meantime, she spends eight hours a week teaching art to rambunctious elementary school students and devotes the rest of her time to painting works with ominous titles like Three in the Afternoon of the Shredded Squid, based on the friend’s story about the funky colleague. Another piece, Monster Bi Bi Bi, features two dinosaurs in a tribute to a pesky fourth-grader.
Though Squid’s olfactory background story doesn’t show through in the piece, the influence of painters like Basquiat is obvious in her child-like scribbling and use of everyday symbols such as smiley-faces and recurring “F” shapes.
“I like Basquiat. It was a great movie, not like Klimt,” Chang said. “They turned Klimt’s life into a romance ... It totally sucked.”
Taiwan’s politics is mystifying to many foreign observers. Gosh, that is strange, considering just how logical and straightforward it all is. Let us take a step back and review. Thanks to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), starting this year people will once again have Christmas Day off work. In 2002, the Scrooges in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said “bah, humbug” to that. The holiday is not actually Christmas, but rather Constitution Day, celebrating the enactment of the Constitution of the Republic of China (ROC) on December 25, 1947. The DPP and the then pan-blue dominated legislature
War in the Taiwan Strait is currently a sexy topic, but it is not the only potential Chinese target. Taking the Russian Far East would alleviate or even solve a lot of China’s problems, including critical dependencies on fuel, key minerals, food, and most crucially, water. In a previous column (“Targeting Russian Asia,” Dec. 28, 2024, page 12) I noted that having following this topic for years, I consistently came to this conclusion: “It would simply be easier to buy what they need from the Russians, who also are nuclear-armed and useful partners in helping destabilize the American-led world order.
If you’ve lately been feeling that the “Jurassic Park” franchise has jumped an even more ancient creature — the shark — hold off any thoughts of extinction. Judging from the latest entry, there’s still life in this old dino series. Jurassic World Rebirth captures the awe and majesty of the overgrown lizards that’s been lacking for so many of the movies, which became just an endless cat-and-mouse in the dark between scared humans against T-Rexes or raptors. Jurassic World Rebirth lets in the daylight. Credit goes to screenwriter David Koepp, who penned the original Jurassic Park, and director Gareth Edwards, who knows
Last Thursday, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) detected 41 sorties of Chinese aircraft and nine navy vessels around Taiwan over a 24-hour period. “Thirty out of 41 sorties crossed the median line and entered Taiwan’s northern, central, southwestern and eastern ADIZ (air defense identification zones),” it reported. Local media noted that the exercises coincided with the annual Han Kuang military exercises in Taiwan. During the visit of then-US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in August 2022, the largest number of sorties was on Aug. 5, “involving a total of 47 fighter aircraft and two supporting reconnaissance/patrol aircraft.
RSS