The Museum of Broken Relationships (失戀博物館), winner of the 2011 Kenneth Hudson Award for most innovative European museum, has brought its show to Taipei for the summer. Founded by ex-lovers Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic, the Taipei version presents some 70 objects donated by the brokenhearted from across the globe, plus over 30 love mementos from locals. Every object is colored by personal experience, local culture and history, but each is a hologram of a universal human emotion.
■ Huashan 1914 Creative Park (華山1914文化創), 1, Bade Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市中正區八德路一段1號), tel: (02) 2358-1914, open daily from 9am to 6pm. General admission: NT$200
■ Until Sept. 1
Photo Courtesy of the Michael Ku Gallery
Chiang Iuan-hau’s (江元皓) solo exhibition Light Playground (光 遊戲場) is one microfilm and five computer animations about light. Running on loop in a pitch-black gallery, microfilm Cruises (遊輪) shows how the computer’s glowing screen can be a way for the user to see the world, yet be monitored at the same time. In Chiang’s digital works — three of which are collaborations with French choreographer Christian Rizzo — light is the leading character in scenes like a black forest, a roving car and a movie theater. Through the works, Chiang interprets light as a dominant phenomenon that changes human behavior and encourages obsession.
■ Digital Art Center (台北數位藝術中心), 180 Fuhua Rd, Taipei City (台北市福華路180號), tel: (02) 7736-0708. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm
■ Until August 18
Photo Courtesy of Kuan Hong Arts Management
Here to Where (這裡那裡) brings together 13 international artists including Yoshitomo Nara, Gary Baseman, Kwon Ki-Soo and Jang Tarng-kuh (張堂庫) who depict a fantasy world on canvas, paper and other media. Some, like Kwon’s pop-arty Dongguri who flies aircraft through grape and orange-colored skies, are purely playful pages seemingly out of a children’s book. Others, — such as Baseman’s Dying of Thirst (渴望而死), shown below— are cutesy landscapes that hide traces of a darker adult world.
■ Metaphysical Art Gallery (形而上畫廊), 7F, 219, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段219號7樓), tel: (02) 2711-0055. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 6:30pm
■ Opens Monday. Until Sept. 29
Photo Courtesy of the Metaphysical Art Gallery
In the solo exhibition Little Scenes (小場景), Shantel Liao (廖翊晴) presents 16 photographs of painstakingly crafted dolls in a world built with tiny tanks, trains and cathedrals. These black-and-white landscapes of military advances and street demonstrations are clearly unreal, but appear in details even finer than a true-to-life photograph.
■ 1839 Little Gallery (1839小藝廊), B1, 120 Yanji St, Taipei City (台北市延吉街120號B1), tel: (02) 2778-8458. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 8pm, free admission
■ Opens today, reception tomorrow at 2:30pm. Until August 7
Metal-smith Nick Dong (董承濂) presents experiments with enamel in a new solo exhibition at the Michael Ku Gallery. Instead of throwing away his graphite sketches for metal sculptures, he melts enamel at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit and pours it onto the sketch to create a physical archive. The record is then fused to stainless steel and copper sculptures. “Sketching, for most artists, is the beginning of a process typically intended to generate a polished, finished artwork. Far more than arriving at an end result, I’ve been increasingly fascinated by the journey leading to it,” writes Dong in the gallery notes.
■ 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), tel: (02) 2577-5601. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 8pm
■ Until Sept. 8
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
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
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
RSS