Journeys To Recover Your Future (恢復 未來的旅程) is Hsu Chang-yu’s (許常郁) solo exhibition of extraordinary landscapes. Mountains and bodies of water fill up the canvas, arresting the viewer’s gaze briefly with fine and realistic detail. In every piece, the immersion experience is broken by polka dots, confetti-like stripes or other two-dimensional objects called inexplicably into the picture frame, so that it becomes a view of two worlds, familiar and ethereal, existing at once. Hsu is a Taiwanese contemporary artist trained in France, where she developed a visual style that treats landscape paintings as mirrors of her psychological state as a minority.
■ Liang Gallery (尊彩藝術中心), 366 Ruiguang Rd, Taipei City (台北市瑞光路366號), (02) 2797-1100, open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 6pm
■ Opening reception tonight at 6pm
Photo courtesy of Liang Gallery
Photographer Chen Szu-ying (陳思縈) makes her solo Taipei debut at Between Breaths (呼吸的縫隙). Chen brings 17 prints of joyful minor moments of daily life, like a child scaling a short fence, a girl encountering a ewe and summer wind hitting a wall of foliage in a single rush. Images, taken quickly on a smartphone, digital camera or traditional film camera, have a consistent vintage feel. Chen (b. 1988) is a graduate of Ming Chuan University (銘傳大學) who is currently studying contemporary art in Japan. This exhibition is part of 1839 Little Gallery’s (1839 小藝廊) annual juried showcase, which this year presents six promising photographers under 35 years old.
■ 1839 Little Gallery, B1, 120 Yanji St, Taipei City (台北市延吉街120號B1), tel: (02) 2778-8458. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 8pm
■ Until Wednesday
Photo courtesy of MOCA, Taipei
The Five Wardrobes She Has (她的五個衣櫥), a digital exhibition, takes a worried look at the matter of cultivating personal appearance. In times of chaos, people overcompensate for the lack of greater control by hyper-managing the environment immediately surrounding them — “that is, their clothes,” write the curators, quoting novelist Eileen Chang (張愛玲). Artist and co-curator Tsau Saiau-yue’s (曹筱玥) Flowery Heart (花漾心) is an interactive installation about fashion and the way it can be used to shore up anxieties. W3FI, a roomful of LED-lit data visualizations by Christopher Coleman and Laleh Mehran, investigates how the digital self affects its creator in real life.
■ National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (國立臺灣美術館), 2, Wuquan W Rd Sec 1, Greater Taichung (台中市西區五權西路一段2號) tel: (04) 2372-3552, open Tuesdays to Fridays from 9am to 5pm, Saturdays and Sundays from 9am to 6pm
■ Until Nov. 23
2014 Street Fun, Fun Street (2014街大歡囍) is “a museum without walls” by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei. Twenty amateur and professional artists have installed work in Datung’s (大同區) Chifeng community (赤峰街區), including Yang Chun-chun’s (日淳) Dreamer (夢想‧家) mural on Chifeng Street (赤峰街). This two-month program is offering To the Past (過去事), live shows dramatizing the story of the Chifeng community, and workshops on woodworking, leather work and photography. For more information or to register, visit www.mocataipei.org.tw.
■ Chifeng Community (赤峰街區), MOCA Studio Underground (地下實驗) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, tel: (02) 2552-3721, free admission
■ Opens tomorrow. Until Oct. 26
Rooms to Meet the Gaze (晤對會面所), a joint exhibition, focuses on the portrait. Chen Ming-tsung (陳明聰) and Lee Min-jong (李民中), a photojournalist and a painter, respectively, are displaying precise copies and freer interpretations of their human subjects, as two points of view on what portraiture should be.
■ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (關渡美術館), 1 Xueyuan Rd, Taipei City (台北市學園路1號), tel: (02) 2896-1000 ext 2432. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 5pm
■ Until Sept. 14
One of the most important gripes that Taiwanese have about the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is that it has failed to deliver concretely on higher wages, housing prices and other bread-and-butter issues. The parallel complaint is that the DPP cares only about glamor issues, such as removing markers of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) colonialism by renaming them, or what the KMT codes as “de-Sinification.” Once again, as a critical election looms, the DPP is presenting evidence for that charge. The KMT was quick to jump on the recent proposal of the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) to rename roads that symbolize
On the evening of June 1, Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) apologized and resigned in disgrace. His crime was instructing his driver to use a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon. The Control Yuan is the government branch that investigates, audits and impeaches government officials for, among other things, misuse of government funds, so his misuse of a government vehicle was highly inappropriate. If this story were told to anyone living in the golden era of swaggering gangsters, flashy nouveau riche businessmen, and corrupt “black gold” politics of the 1980s and 1990s, they would have laughed.
It was just before 6am on a sunny November morning and I could hardly contain my excitement as I arrived at the wharf where I would catch the boat to one of Penghu’s most difficult-to-access islands, a trip that had been on my list for nearly a decade. Little did I know, my dream would soon be crushed. Unsure about which boat was heading to Huayu (花嶼), I found someone who appeared to be a local and asked if this was the right place to wait. “Oh, the boat to Huayu’s been canceled today,” she told me. I couldn’t believe my ears. Surely,
When Lisa, 20, laces into her ultra-high heels for her shift at a strip club in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, she knows that aside from dancing, she will have to comfort traumatized soldiers. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, exhausted troops are the main clientele of the Flash Dancers club in the center of the northeastern city, just 20 kilometers from Russian forces. For some customers, it provides an “escape” from the war, said Valerya Zavatska — a 25-year-old law graduate who runs the club with her mother, an ex-dancer. But many are not there just for the show. They “want to talk about what hurts,” she
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