German Contemporary Art: Facing Reality 2012, Eye On Andrea Damp, Michael Bach and Wolfgang Ellenrieder is a group show of figurative painting by three German artists. Damp’s work features children wandering through bucolic, and somewhat psychedelic, landscapes rendered in vivid colors. Bach’s realistic city panoramas offer a lyrical tenderness to urban settings, while Ellenrieder uses everyday objects to explore the construction and representation of image.
■ Aki Gallery (也趣藝廊), 141 Minzu W Rd, Taipei City (台北市民族西路141號), tel: (02) 2599-1171. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from noon to 6:30pm
■ Begins Saturday. Opening reception on May 5 at 3pm. Until May 20
Photo Courtesy of Aki Gallery
According to Project Fulfill Art Space, LuxuryLogico (豪華朗機工) is a “super hybrid artist group” that comprises Llunc Lin (林昆穎), Chen Chih-chien (陳志建), Chang Keng-hau (張耿豪) and Chang Geng-hwa (張耿華). In Fruition — Fulfill Arts (福 — Fulfill Arts), the new media artists pay tribute to nine of their Taiwanese contemporaries by creating new works that were inspired by, include or document their artistic heroes, such as sculptor Tu Wei-cheng (涂維政) and digital photographer Hung Tung-lu (洪東祿). The nine works on display include video and sound installation, puzzles, etchings and paintings. On May 5 at 5pm, the collective will begin a 24-hour “one-day performance,” a salute to performance artist Hsieh Teh-ching (謝德慶).
■ 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
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 4pm. Until June 1
Photo Courtesy of Ku Gallery
The portraits of Japanese-born, US-based artist Yuhi Hasegawa possess an almost tribal quality: Think the neo-expressionist graffiti of Jean-Michel Basquiat informed by a more refined quality that owes a debt to African masks. In Night Carnival, Hasegawa continues his exploration of primitive human emotions using solid coloring with several undercoats, which lend his works an appealing luminescence. Working from neither photographs nor sketches, his output is a spontaneous expression of the human form.
■ VT Art Salon (非常廟藝文空間), B1, 47 Yitong St, Taipei City (台北市伊通街47號B1), tel: (02) 2516-1060. Open Tuesdays through Thursdays from 1:30pm to 9pm, and Fridays and Saturdays from 1:30pm to 10pm
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 7pm. Until May 26
The complementary and inseparable relationship of a glaze’s color and the object on which it’s placed underlies Glaze-coating (釉彩衣), a solo show of ceramics by Shih Chi-yao (施繼堯). Shih’s abstract sculptures possess a delicate linearity of shape and pattern that produces dramatic tension.
■ Yingge Ceramics Museum (鶯歌陶瓷博物館), 200 Wenhua Rd, Yingge Dist, New Taipei City (新北市鶯歌區文化路200號), tel: (02) 8677-2727. Open daily from 9:30am to 5pm. Closes at 6pm on Saturdays and Sunday
■ Begins Saturday. Until June 17
One has to wonder what Holland-based German artist Isabelle Wenzel thinks about the modern businesswoman. In Posing, a solo show of six large-scale staged photographs, one shot depicts a woman standing on her hands in what appears to be an office strewn full of documents, her dress pulled over her head and torso with only her sheer nylons and ass exposed. Wenzel has stated in interviews that she explores gender roles in the business place, the dress code and settings both alienating and dehumanizing. Think Christina Hendricks in the television series Mad Men.
■ Ku Gallery (頡學空間), 9, Ln 14, Siwei Rd, Taipei City (台北市四維路14巷9號), tel: (02) 2755-5985 Open Tuesdays to Fridays from 11am to 8pm and Saturdays and Sundays from 11am to 6pm
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
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