Page Tsou (鄒駿昇), winner of the International Award for Illustration at 2011 Bologna Children’s Book Fair, pieces together his larger-than-life sketches of animals to tell the tale of a boy who gets an unwelcome gift: a ticket to an art museum. Tsou’s work is on view now at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s new space for children that opened on April 4. This gallery’s grand opening exhibition, The Gift (禮物), collects Tsou’s pictures and other gift-themed works by seven local illustrators. It also includes a performance by the Flying Group Theatre (飛人集社劇團), storytelling and hands-on activities, artist-led workshops and guided tours for families. For more information, visit www.tfam.museum.
■ Children’s Art Education Center at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 181, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 3, Taipei (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
■ Until Sept. 14
Photo courtesy of TFAM
Memo-scape (錄地景) is an exhibition about the disappearing historic sites of Cijin (旗津) of Greater Kaohsiung. Cijin is home to Taiwan’s first public school, first international port, first Christian church, first western-style hospital and first elementary-school baseball team that defeated a Japanese team. Recent commercial development has taken a toll on its heritage sites, which are razed for new buildings as visitor numbers dwindle. Over the course of two years, National Kaohsiung Normal University professor Huang Sun-quan (黃孫權) and the art ensemble Islands conducted workshops and field interviews with current and former residents, collecting their stories and old photographs of representative historic sites. At the exhibition, borrowed black-and-white photos are situated next to new color photos taken at the same locations, and the oral history of the spaces are broadcast through a specially designed “auto-narration machine.”
■ TheCube Project Space (立方計畫空間), 2F, 13, Alley 1, Ln 136, Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段136巷1弄13號2樓), tel: (02) 2368-9418. Open Wednesdays through Sundays from 2pm to 8pm
■ Until May 25
Photo courtesy of Mind Set Art Center
To the Villages (走向村莊) is the Taipei debut for Kitai Kazuo, a master Japanese photographer who rose to acclaim in 1976 with his series To the Villages. Showing now at Aki Gallery, To The Villages feature monochrome images of labor and leisure in the countryside: a smoking fisherman; neighbors talking by a bonfire; a family in a communal bath; a young girl in a classic school uniform, riding an bicycle by a field. In the 1970s, as Japan transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial society, most documentary photographers were focusing their coverage on locations of new growth. Kitai’s series, set in places of decline and population outflow, is among the few records of a lifestyle irretrievable today.
■ Aki Gallery (也趣藝廊), 141 Minzu W Rd, Taipei City (台北市民族西路141號), tel: (02) 2599-1171. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from noon to 6:30pm
■ Until May 4
My Generation, My Design (我的世代．我的設計) is a career retrospective exhibition for Taiwanese designer Yu Ming-lung (游明龍). The gallery assembles over a hundred of Yu’s posters, commercials, corporate ID and cultural creative products from the past 30 years. Born in 1957 in Taoyuan County, Yu Ming-lung is a modernist designer regarded as the first to actively apply Taiwanese cultural heritage to his work. His portfolio focuses on pictorial form of traditional Chinese characters, local folk culture and other aspects of life in Taiwan.
■ 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 May 4
Young Romanian painter Oana Farcas debuts in Taiwan at solo show Between the Visible and the Invisible. Farcas deals with people, painting portraits of Francis Bacon, British painter Lucian Freud, as well as fictional humans and half-human creatures in close-ups, miniature and large-scale crowd scenes. The characters are depicted in mid-action and convincingly realistic at first glance, but readily blend into the strange misty background to take on a dreamy quality.
■ Mind Set Art Center (安卓藝術), 16-1, Xinsheng S Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市新生南路三段16-1號), tel: (02) 2365-6008. Open Tuesdays to Sunday from 2pm to 6pm
■ Until May 17
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
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