For four years, Taiwanese artist Chen Chun-hao (陳浚豪) has been honing the art of mosquito-nail composition. Using a modified nail gun, he inserts the long slender pins on paintings, grouping them and arranging their height with a pointillist’s precision. His latest works are on view now at Reclaiming the Lost Territories (還我河山). Chen has “reclaimed” classic Chinese ink paintings that fell into political disfavor during the Qing Dynasty, by reproducing them as enormous pin-screen pieces.
■ Tina Keng Gallery (耿畫廊), 15, Ln 548, Ruiguang Rd, Taipei (台北市瑞光路548巷15號), tel: (02) 2659-0798. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 7pm
■ Opens tomorrow. Until Jan. 26
Photo courtesy of Eslite Gallery
10 Years in Europe (第一個十年) features photographs taken by Simon Chang (張雍) when he lived in Slovenia, Austria and other parts of Europe between 2003 and 2013. This period was a happy reprieve from Taiwan, where he had “lived as a number, not a name,” Chang writes in the gallery notes, referring to the numbers used to identify conscripts in Taiwan’s army and students in the public-school system. At his solo exhibition, the photographs are numbered and ordered chronologically. Within each frame, Chang has tried to compose an unquantifiable human emotion or condition.
■ Soka Art Center (索卡藝術中心), 2F, 57, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei (台北市敦化南路一段57號2樓), tel: (02) 2570-0390. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 9pm
■ Until Feb. 16
Chen I-hsuen (陳以軒) pulls together a range of media for his first solo show Nessun Dorma ( 你是懂了嘛), a study of person-to-person communication. In an opera work titled Nessun Dorma, Chen sings a famous Italian aria with enough zest to mask its nonsense Chinese-language lyrics, in a reminder that what we say greatly depends on how we say it. For a video work titled I Know, Chen films the faces of friends as he divulges actual secrets about himself. Onscreen, the friends’ rapt focus and other expressions serve as a kind of spiritual pornography that satisfies the viewer’s desire to be understood.
■ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (關渡美術館), 1 Xueyuan Rd, Taipei (台北市學園路1號), tel: (02) 2893-8870. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 5pm
■ Until Feb. 23
At solo show Dreams for Sale (夢想大拍賣), Benrei Huang (黃本蕊) presents acrylic paintings of a prominently whiskered rabbit named Nini (尼尼). Each work is a colorful picture-story featuring Nini in a familiar situation, be it scheming with dwarf rabbits in Partisanship (政黨生涯) or peering out wistfully by a clock in 9-5 Syndrome (上班族徵候群).
■ Eslite Gallery (誠品畫廊), 5F, 11 Songgao Rd, Taipei (台北市松高路11號5樓), tel: (02) 8789-3388 X1588. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until Jan. 26
At last year’s Venice Biennale, Taiwan’s Vincent J.F. Huang (黃瑞芳) brought his installations to the pavilion of Tuvalu — a Polynesian island nation that named him as their official representative artist. In Taipei, Huang is staging the sequel to his Venice show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Destiny Intertwined — A Dialogue between Vincent J.F. Huang and Tuvalu (命運‧交織─黃瑞芳與吐瓦魯的對話) brings together works originally shown in Venice, along with recent installations that direct attention to the sea-level rise induced by climate change.
■ MOCA Studio, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA, Taipei), 39 Changan W Rd, Taipei (台北市長安西路39號), tel: (02) 2552-3720. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm
■ Until Feb. 29
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
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As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
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