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
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
A series of dramatic news items dropped last month that shed light on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attitudes towards three candidates for last year’s presidential election: Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), Terry Gou (郭台銘), founder of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), and New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It also revealed deep blue support for Ko and Gou from inside the KMT, how they interacted with the CCP and alleged election interference involving NT$100 million (US$3.05 million) or more raised by the
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,
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
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