Wade Wang (王善揚), a twenty-something from China’s Fujian Province, is on the other side of the Strait for the first time. So far, he has been to Eslite Bookstore to collect an award — a second-place finish for his digital animation about his father. He has also spent a day at an art exhibition in Songshan Cultural and Creative Park.
“I went in and thought the gallerists really cared about the works. It wasn’t even their own — they just came over to talk about it and shared their interpretation. [Taiwan’s] art culture seems quite rich,” he says.
For a designer working hard to make it, it’s a nice reprieve.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Time
“When I was little I wanted to become a great man like my father, a police officer. Ultimately I chose to do art, and then my other family members said, ‘You learn art, is that suitable?’ They worried. My father, though, supported me and didn’t place any pressures on me,” Wang says.
YOUNG DESIGNERS TODAY
Fathers and gallerists aside, the structural pressures on the modern young designer are strong and mostly unpleasant. There’s the growing need to know the business end, plus soaring education costs and a surplus of designers from degree programs vying for limited opportunities.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Times
Chanon Treenet, grand prize winner of the Taiwan International Student Design Competition, feels the pressures intensely.
“I could not stay in the UK after my graduation because I needed to apply for a visa. To get the visa, I could not do my style of experimental work. I would maybe have needed to apply for a job as a cartoon animator,” says Treenat, 27, a soft-spoken animator from Bangkok, who won the NT$400,000 grand prize.
“In Thailand, there is a market for my kind of work, but it is very small,” he says.
Phots: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
His film Neither Lit nor Dark and Wang’s Memories are currently on view at Eslite Bookstore on Dunhua Road, along with other winners of the Taiwan International Student Design Competition.
This year, the international jury awarded cash prizes to 37 designers under 30 in four categories — product design, visual design, digital animation and brand-specific design — plus one grand prize from any category.
As in previous years, winners have avoided political briar bushes and international society’s big flashpoints, working instead to solve uncontroversial problems like East Asia’s ageing population.
Photo: enru lin, Taipei times
There are products for seniors such as Easy Cut — a medicine bottle with its own pill-cutting device built into the cap — and Cyclecart, a grocery caddy that can be folded into a walker.
The gold medal in the product design category went to Taiwanese college seniors Lee Hsi-i (李思誼) and Tseng Yu-cheng (曾郁程) for their Balance Lever Seesaw Game (槓桿翹翹板遊戲) — a seesaw with an adjustable fulcrum. Its mission is bittersweet: allowing an only child to enjoy a seesaw with a portly parent, possibly his only playmate in a society with a declining birthrate.
Among the lot, Treenet’s Neither Lit Nor Dark is the rare design that barely makes an effort at being commercially viable.
“Many audiences watch it and tell me they do not understand,” he says. “Normally when people make animation they make cartoon animations. I tried to do something a little different.”
Neither Lit Nor Dark follows a boy as he walks home through dim alleys and ochre fields. There’s no narrative, only scenes, and the sound of the boy’s breathing puts the film in a weird place — he’s afraid of something, maybe a caged mouse that’s spinning alone in a wheel or a thundercloud releasing ribbons of black rain in the distance. With each step, the rasping accelerates and seeps out louder from the surround sound system, until you want to shut it off.
“I want the audience to feel fear. It’s horror animation,” Treenet says.
In Thailand, he’s trying to make ends meet, bouncing from commission to commission while aiming at art that is radical.
“I will put my funding into a longer film that I can show to people. Eventually, I hope to do work that is big,” he says.
War in the Taiwan Strait is currently a sexy topic, but it is not the only potential Chinese target. Taking the Russian Far East would alleviate or even solve a lot of China’s problems, including critical dependencies on fuel, key minerals, food, and most crucially, water. In a previous column (“Targeting Russian Asia,” Dec. 28, 2024, page 12) I noted that having following this topic for years, I consistently came to this conclusion: “It would simply be easier to buy what they need from the Russians, who also are nuclear-armed and useful partners in helping destabilize the American-led world order.
Last Thursday, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) detected 41 sorties of Chinese aircraft and nine navy vessels around Taiwan over a 24-hour period. “Thirty out of 41 sorties crossed the median line and entered Taiwan’s northern, central, southwestern and eastern ADIZ (air defense identification zones),” it reported. Local media noted that the exercises coincided with the annual Han Kuang military exercises in Taiwan. During the visit of then-US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in August 2022, the largest number of sorties was on Aug. 5, “involving a total of 47 fighter aircraft and two supporting reconnaissance/patrol aircraft.
July 7 to July 13 Even though the Japanese colonizers declared Taiwan “pacified” on Nov. 18, 1895, unrest was still brewing in Pingtung County. The Japanese had completed their march of conquest down the west coast of Taiwan, stamping out local resistance. But in their haste to conquer the Republic of Formosa’s last stronghold of Tainan, they largely ignored the highly-militarized Liudui (六堆, six garrisons) Hakka living by the foothills in Kaohsiung and Pingtung. They were organized as their name suggested, and commanders such as Chiu Feng-hsiang (邱鳳祥) and Chung Fa-chun (鍾發春) still wanted to fight. Clashes broke out in today’s
Xu Pengcheng looks over his shoulder and, after confirming the coast is clear, helps his crew of urban adventurers climb through the broken window of an abandoned building. Long popular in the West, urban exploration, or “urbex” for short, sees city-dwelling thrill-seekers explore dilapidated, closed-off buildings and areas — often skirting the law in the process. And it is growing in popularity in China, where a years-long property sector crisis has left many cities dotted with empty buildings. Xu, a 29-year-old tech worker from the eastern city of Qingdao, has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers for his photos of rundown schools and
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