Written by Canadian artist Michelle Wilson, A Tale of Two is a picture book about a pair of feuding siblings and the strange, subterranean world they get sucked into. But A Tale of Two is not your typical children’s fantasy. Illustrated with vividly-detailed tableaus Wilson built and photographed in her Kaohsiung apartment, A Tale of Two was created to contain layers of meanings that she hopes parents and kids will find equally engaging.
Installations will be on view at the Dog Pig Art Cafe (豆皮文藝咖啡館) in Kaohsiung starting on Tuesday. Visitors to the book’s Sept. 22 launch at the same venue have the chance to become fully immersed into the world Wilson created. The triple feature will include an interactive installation based on illustrations from A Tale of Two, screenings of vintage silent films and music performances by members of Squids, Loose Lion, The Apes Have Landed and The Blue Truckers. On Sept. 23, Wilson will host a reading for parents and children from 3:30pm to 5pm, during which attendees will be invited to interact with her artwork.
Wilson based the book on her childhood. “I started thinking of this idea of taking stories from what I did to my sisters when we were young, trying to scare them, trying to manipulate them with really horrifying stories,” she says.
Photo courtesy of Michelle Wilson
Fantasy films from the 1980s and 1990s, like Goonies, The Neverending Story and The Princess Bride also inspired the atmosphere of A Tale of Two.
“There is that tiny element of reality, but then there is this entrance into a fantasy world that somehow kids just stumble upon,” says Wilson.
A Tale of Two revolves around two sisters, Big Sis and Lil Sis, who live alone. As a part of an elaborate prank, Big Sis arranges for a giant black bat to fly out of a birthday cake she baked for her younger sibling.
Photo courtesy of Michelle Wilson
“The younger sister uses her birthday wish to say ‘I wish all that stuff you threaten me with would happen and you would know how it feels to be me,’” says Wilson. Her childish wish for revenge is unexpectedly granted and the two are pulled into an underground world filled with menacing monsters and mysterious caverns.
Visitors to the book’s launch event can immerse themselves into A Tale of Two through tented light boxes inspired by zoetropes, a spinning device that creates the visual illusion of movement with slots and a succession of images.
“One minute you are in a very real space and the next minute you just have to press your eyes up to the viewfinder and you are isolated in this fantasy world,” says Wilson. Her partner, Angus Cruikshank, composed music to go with each of the light boxes.
Also on view will be vintage silent films that Wilson edited down from their original playing times to 15 minutes each. They include horror classics like The Phantom of the Opera and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as a hand-tinted Georges Melies A Trip to the Moon.
Wilson wants the event to appeal to both the Taiwanese and expat communities. A Tale of Two has been published in English and Chinese, Cruikshank’s music has no lyrics and Wilson has invited students from English-language schools to participate in her Sept. 23 reading.
“You don’t have to be able to read the book, you will get the feel and vibe of it and that carries all the way through the narrative,” says Wilson. “The story itself, if you read it word for word as a book, is not intended for children. But anyone can reframe it in a way that is child friendly and kids respond to.”
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS