Intersecting Vectors (斜面連結) is a test in thinking outside the box. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM, 台北市立美術館) invited three young curators to pull pieces from old collections for new conceptual art shows. Chin Ya-chun (秦雅君), Wang Yung-lin (王?琳) and Tsai Ming-jiun (蔡明君) present one galleried recombination each of paintings, videos, woodcut prints, linen art, site installations and other previously displayed pieces. Their exhibition includes six art tours in Mandarin Chinese, starting on Nov. 3. For details, visit www.tfam.museum.
■ TFAM, 181, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市中山北路三段181號), tel: (02) 2595-7656. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9:30am to 5:30pm and until 8:30pm on Saturdays. Admission: NT$30
■ Opens tomorrow. Until Feb. 16
Photo courtesy of Gallery 100
Chen Wei (陳蔚) paints old clothes, small animals, withered plants and other minutiae of life. At the solo show See You Somewhere Sometime (未竟之地 十月), the objects look bruised and desolate on the canvas, with outlines obscured. For the artist, they are points of meditation for remembering the past and detaching from the present. Chen was inspired by Marcel Proust’s stream-of-consciousness novel Time Regained — the seventh volume in his monumental In Search of Lost Time — in which insignificant objects allow the protagonist to relive bygone incidents.
■ Gallery 100 (百藝畫廊), 1F, 13, Ln 252, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段252巷13號1樓), tel: (02) 2731-0876. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until Nov. 17
Photo courtesy of Asia Art Center
Taitung native Pan Hsin-hua (潘信華) uses traditional ink painting techniques to depict contemporary lifestyles in Taiwan, producing vintage yet surreal works that critic Philip Chao-jen Wu (吳超然) has called “never seen before in Chinese contemporary ink painting.” Recent works on view at his solo exhibition Gaze Into Illusions (觀幻) are luxuriant countryside landscapes featuring the adventures of two boys.
■ Asia Art Center II (亞洲藝術中心二館), 93 Lequn 2nd Road, Taipei City (台北市樂群二路93號), tel: (02) 8502-7939. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6:30pm
■ Until Nov. 17
Tangible Splendor (光華可賞) is an introduction to mother-of-pearl ornamentation in traditional lacquer ware. Mother-of-pearl is the lustrous substance harvested from the inside of shells. As early as the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE) dynasty, artists cut mother-of-pearl into pieces and arranged them on wet lacquer to form patterns and scenes. In the 14th century, maritime trade brought mother-of-pearl techniques to the Ryukyu Islands and Southeast Asia. The National Museum of History (國立歷史博物館) is showing 51 mother-of-pearl antiques that trace the technique’s evolution across history.
■ National Museum of History, 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. General admission: NT$30
■ Until Nov. 24
Huang Ko-wei (黃可維) uses thick and unbridled brush strokes to paint death, namely the carcasses of birds. The results, displayed at solo show Irrational Number (無理數), are idealized forms that draw attention to the difference between seeing and truly facing the end of life, as well as the distinction between a reproduction and an original.
■ VT Artsalon (非常廟藝文空間), B1, 17, Ln 56, Xinsheng N Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市新生北路三段56巷17號B1), tel: (02) 2597-2525. Open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 1:30pm to 9pm
■ Until Nov. 19
In 2020, a labor attache from the Philippines in Taipei sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding that a Filipina worker accused of “cyber-libel” against then-president Rodrigo Duterte be deported. A press release from the Philippines office from the attache accused the woman of “using several social media accounts” to “discredit and malign the President and destabilize the government.” The attache also claimed that the woman had broken Taiwan’s laws. The government responded that she had broken no laws, and that all foreign workers were treated the same as Taiwan citizens and that “their rights are protected,
A white horse stark against a black beach. A family pushes a car through floodwaters in Chiayi County. People play on a beach in Pingtung County, as a nuclear power plant looms in the background. These are just some of the powerful images on display as part of Shen Chao-liang’s (沈昭良) Drifting (Overture) exhibition, currently on display at AKI Gallery in Taipei. For the first time in Shen’s decorated career, his photography seeks to speak to broader, multi-layered issues within the fabric of Taiwanese society. The photographs look towards history, national identity, ecological changes and more to create a collection of images
The recent decline in average room rates is undoubtedly bad news for Taiwan’s hoteliers and homestay operators, but this downturn shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. According to statistics published by the Tourism Administration (TA) on March 3, the average cost of a one-night stay in a hotel last year was NT$2,960, down 1.17 percent compared to 2023. (At more than three quarters of Taiwan’s hotels, the average room rate is even lower, because high-end properties charging NT$10,000-plus skew the data.) Homestay guests paid an average of NT$2,405, a 4.15-percent drop year on year. The countrywide hotel occupancy rate fell from
March 16 to March 22 In just a year, Liu Ching-hsiang (劉清香) went from Taiwanese opera performer to arguably Taiwan’s first pop superstar, pumping out hits that captivated the Japanese colony under the moniker Chun-chun (純純). Last week’s Taiwan in Time explored how the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) theme song for the Chinese silent movie The Peach Girl (桃花泣血記) unexpectedly became the first smash hit after the film’s Taipei premiere in March 1932, in part due to aggressive promotion on the streets. Seeing an opportunity, Columbia Records’ (affiliated with the US entity) Taiwan director Shojiro Kashino asked Liu, who had
RSS