Celebrated for his 2005 photo series of whale sharks being slaughtered at a fishing port in Yilan County, Shen Chao-liang (沈昭良) takes his camera on to dry land with Stage: Illusion Reality (幻影現實), a series of photos of makeshift stages and the temple environments where they are placed. The images, snapped at rural and urban areas throughout central and southern Taiwan, are bereft of people and props, suggesting that the traditional forms of entertainment common to temple festivals are increasingly becoming a thing of the past.
■ Aki Gallery (也趣), 141 Minzu W Rd, Taipei City
(台北市民族西路141號). Open Tuesdays to Sundays from noon to 6:30pm. Tel: (02) 2599-1171
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 3pm. Until Oct. 2
Photography, installation, drawing and documentary videos are brought together in Reflection (反射), a solo exhibition on prolific and respected Chinese artist Zhan Wang (展望), which runs the gamut of the 48-year-old artist’s career. Zhan, however, is mostly famous for his stainless steel sculptures that replicate rock formations, a number of which will be on display. The exhibition is complemented by a public exhibition of Artificial Rock No. 59 (假山石#59), a towering work that is on display at Taipei 101, and Artificial Rock No. 125 (假山石#125) outside the Xinyi Eslite Store (誠品信義店) in Taipei.
■ Eslite Gallery (誠品畫廊), 5F, 11 Songgao Rd, Taipei City (台北市松高路11號5F). Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm. Tel: (02) 8789-3388 X1588
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 3pm. Until Oct. 3
Bamboo Curtain Studio, a multi-functional art and performance space, is celebrating its 15th anniversary with a retrospective exhibition on the works of 15 artists who have lived or worked at the venue since its inception. The exhibit’s title is Aesthetics at the Edge: An Alternative Way for Creativity. The artists include Tsong Pu (莊普), the “godfather of Taiwanese installation art,” muralist Michael Lin (林明宏) and Kuo Wei-kuo (郭維國), creator of psychologically rich and haunting surrealist oil paintings. The selected artists were also chosen to illustrate the evolution of Taiwan’s art scene over the past 15 years.
■ Bamboo Curtain Studio (竹圍工作室), 39, Ln 88, Jhongjheng E Rd Sec 2, Tamsui Township, Taipei County (台北縣淡水鎮中正東路二段88巷39號). Tel: (02) 8809-3809
■ Opening reception on Sunday at 7pm. Until Oct. 10
Hold Down: Interdisciplinary Interactive Performance (Hold Down互動跨領域演出) brings together artists from Taiwan, Thailand, France and Spain in an interdisciplinary work of conceptual performance art. The exhibit/performance integrates interactive performance, installation art and digital music “to explore a more liberal artistic language.” The performances last 60 minutes.
■ Barry Room, Taipei Artist Village (台北國際藝術村百里廳), 7 Beiping E Rd, Taipei City (台北市北平東路7號). For more details call Ms Chen at (02) 3393-7377X407
■ Friday at 7:30pm and Saturday and Sunday at 2:30pm. Tickets are NT$150 and are available at
the door
Kaikai Kiki Gallery’s Contemporary Art in West (西方藝術的世界) brings together 14 contemporary artists from Europe, Japan and North America working in sculpture and painting. The paintings and sculptures on display hail from the collection of Takashi Murakami and the gallery.
■ Kaikai Kiki Gallery, 2, Chongqing S Rd, Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市重慶南路一段2號). Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 10pm. Tel: (02) 2382-0328
■ Until Oct. 3
Burgeoning artists Chang Huei-ming (張暉明) and Liao Chi-yu (廖祈羽) are presenting their first post-Art Taipei show, Never Give Up — The New World, a manga-inspired serial created by the duo in 2009 that centers around two fictional characters: Mimi and Lucy. Digital photography, sculpture and single/multi-channel video are brought together to create fantasy worlds that are meant to serve as projections of real-life situations.
■ VT Art Salon (非常廟藝文空間), B1, 47 Yitong St, Zhongshan Dist, Taipei City (台北市中山區伊通街47號地下一樓). Open Tuesdays to Thursdays from 2pm to 11pm and Fridays and Saturdays from 2pm to 1am. Tel: (02) 2516-1060
■ Until Sept. 18
The Mirror of Time (時代的鏡子) offers a brief taste of the work of four figurative painters from China, born after 1975: Wei Jia (韋嘉), Song Kun (宋琨), Chen Ke (陳可) and Jai Aili (賈藹力). The artists place their subjects in seascapes and landscapes, imbuing the canvases with a dreamy visual language that evokes a sense of otherness.
■ Michael Ku Gallery (谷公館), 4F-2, 21, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段21號4樓之2). Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 8pm. Tel: (02) 2577-5601
■ Until Oct. 10
Taiwan, once relegated to the backwaters of international news media and viewed as a subset topic of “greater China,” is now a hot topic. Words associated with Taiwan include “invasion,” “contingency” and, on the more cheerful side, “semiconductors” and “tourism.” It is worth noting that while Taiwanese companies play important roles in the semiconductor industry, there is no such thing as a “Taiwan semiconductor” or a “Taiwan chip.” If crucial suppliers are included, the supply chain is in the thousands and spans the globe. Both of the variants of the so-called “silicon shield” are pure fantasy. There are four primary drivers
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about
Two years ago my wife and I went to Orchid Island off Taitung for a few days vacation. We were shocked to realize that for what it cost us, we could have done a bike vacation in Borneo for a week or two, or taken another trip to the Philippines. Indeed, most of the places we could have gone for that vacation in neighboring countries offer a much better experience than Taiwan at a much lower price. Hence, the recent news showing that tourist visits to Pingtung County’s Kenting, long in decline, reached a 27 year low this summer came
The female body is a horror movie waiting to happen. From puberty and the grisly onset of menstruation, in pictures such as Brian De Palma’s Carrie and John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps, to pregnancy and childbirth — Rosemary’s Baby is the obvious example — women have provided a rich seam of inspiration for genre film-makers over the past half century. But look a little closer and two trends become apparent: the vast majority of female body-based horror deals with various aspects of the reproductive system, and it has largely been made by men (Titane and The First Omen, two recent examples
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