The National Palace Museum will open an exhibit this weekend on Czech art nouveau painter and decorative artist Alphonse Mucha. Alphonse Mucha — Art Nouveau and Utopia offers a snapshot of this prolific artist’s body of work, including his renowned fin de siecle posters and decorative works, as well as an introduction to his lesser-known drawings, paintings, pastels, jewelry and photographs, which reveals the breadth and complexity of his creative vision.
■ Library Building, National Palace Museum (國立故宮博物院圖書文獻大樓), 221, Zhishan Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市至善路二段221號), tel: (02) 2881-2021. Open daily from 9am to 5pm. Admission: NT$250
■ Begins on Saturday. Until Sept. 12
Photo courtesy of NPM
“All I really care about is me,” and “If I have to explain my work, it’s very hard to explain well by [discussing it],” are among the more ridiculous statements found in the press release for Welcome to the Black Hole Inside of Me (歡迎光臨黑洞中心), an exhibit by Cute Li (李明瑜). With those statements — and that name — we can expect a narcissistic artist who is incapable of explaining what he is up to. The medium is performance art. The message? Look at me. Perhaps Li will provide an explanation of what he is doing when he gives a lecture at the opening reception on Saturday.
■ 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), tel: (02) 3393-7377. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 9pm
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 5:30pm. Until July 3
Literature, architecture, baseball and science fiction are among the subjects Mexican artist Humberto Duque focuses on in Future Bedrooms of Foreign Wars. Duque’s installations attempt to “incite puzzling sceneries” by combining different elements “into a new and puzzling universe.” The elements that make up such scenarios can be models of impossible structures, or artifacts with inexplicable purposes. The goal of his work is to leave hints or traces that allude to possibilities of a time that is not ours. The artist will discuss his work at a lecture on the museum’s third floor on Tuesday at 10am.
■ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (關渡美術館), 1 Xueyuan Rd, Taipei City (台北市學園路1號), tel: (02) 2893-8870. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 5pm
■ Until June 15
Monologue of the Brave (勇者的獨白) is a new series of paintings by Wang Ting-yu (王挺宇). Wang’s monochrome paintings are built up with rubbing and polishing, after which he adds paint. The artist’s working process becomes “a self-examination [whereby the] images are viewed with an aim to analyze [the] physicality of paintings versus flatness of images,” according to the gallery’s exhibition blurb.
■ Project Fulfill Art Space (就在藝術空間), 2, Alley 45, Ln 147, Xinyi Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市信義路三段147巷45弄2號), tel: (02) 2707-6942. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 1pm to 6pm
■ Until July 17
Pioneer of Modern Taiwanese Woodcut Art (開路先鋒) is a memorial exhibit on the work and life of Chiang Han-tung (江漢東). Chiang’s woodcuts, engravings and prints draw upon a variety of modernist styles — avant-garde, abstraction and surrealism — that were popular during the 1950s to 1970s, which he gradually combined with more traditional styles of the East. The exhibit includes objects that span the artist’s entire career.
■ National Museum of History (國立歷史博物館), 49 Nanhai Rd, Taipei City (台北市南海路49號), tel: (02) 2361-0270. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm. Admission: NT$30
■ Until Sunday
Last week, the government rejected a petition to amend the law that would allow permanent residents a path to citizenship. This was widely expected, but it came amid a flurry of negative trends about the future of the nation’s labor force. There was much ironic commentary on the juxtaposition of that decision with its idiotic, abusive reasoning with the urgent demand for labor across a wide range of fields. This demand was highlighted by the government’s plans for five NT$10 billion (US$307.6 million) funds to promote development in key fields, including artificial intelligence (AI), “smart” healthcare and green growth announced
It is dangerous to engage in business in China now, and those considering engaging with it should pay close attention to the example Taiwanese businesspeople are setting. Though way down from the heady days of Taiwanese investments in China two decades ago, a few hundred thousand Taiwanese continue to live, work and study there, but the numbers have been declining fast. As President William Lai (賴清德) pointed out approvingly to a visiting American Senate delegation, China accounted for 80 percent of the total overseas investment in 2011, but was reduced to just 11.4 percent last year. That is a big drop.
Dec 2 to Dec 8 It was the biggest heist in Taiwanese history at that time. In the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1982, two masked men armed with M16 assault rifles knocked out the driver of a United World Chinese Commercial Bank (世華銀行) security van, making away with NT$14 million (worth about NT$30 million today). The van had been parked behind a post office at Taipei’s Minsheng E Road when the robbers struck, and despite the post office being full of customers, nobody inside had noticed the brazen theft. “Criminals robbing a
Supplements are no cottage industry. Hawked by the likes of the Kardashian-Jenner clan, vitamin gummies have in recent years found popularity among millennials and zoomers, who are more receptive to supplements in the form of “powders, liquids and gummies” than older generations. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop — no stranger to dubious health trends — sells its own line of such supplements. On TikTok, influencers who shill multivitamin gummies — and more recently, vitamin patches resembling cutesy, colorful stickers or fine line tattoos — promise glowing skin, lush locks, energy boosts and better sleep. But if it’s real health benefits you’re after, you’re
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