Those interested in film noir and whodunit novels will relish in Chen Wen-chi’s (陳文祺) black-and-white prints which are currently on display at Taipei’s VT Art Salon. The solo exhibition, entitled Authenticity Temporal Memory (偽日記), evokes the feeling of peering into a time portal — although the scenes captured are taken in the present day. Chen overlays letterpress printing techniques with black-and-white photography to achieve this rustic, mysterious facade. Trendy-looking urbanites from five Asian cities — Taipei, Kyoto, Tokyo, Shanghai and Bangkok — are pictured boarding trains and turning street corners. The subject matter is nothing out of the ordinary. Rather, it’s the way Chen plays with different elements like light and shadow, foreground and background, which gives his work a haunting touch. The objective is to confuse the viewer into thinking they are observing a different time period, thus placing concepts such as time and space in limbo.
■ VT Art Salon (非常廟藝文空間), B1, 47 Yitong St, Taipei City (台北市伊通街47號B1), tel: (02) 2516-1060. Open Tuesdays through Thursdays from 1:30pm to 9pm, and Fridays and Saturdays from 1:30pm to 10pm
■ Until March 28
Photo courtesy of Digital Art Center
Upstairs, Downstairs, Art Show Together (樓上．樓下．藝起展) is a joint exhibition at Taipei’s Yesart Air Gallery by Sophia Lin (林淑婷), Taipei-based Chinese artist Yolanda Pong (龎銚) and Lourdes Salcedo Tavira, who hails from Spain. While Lin’s paintings of delicate buds spewing out of tiny vases are more typically feminine, Pong’s use of overlapping black-grey brush strokes are bold and daring. Tavira’s paintings, on the other hand, are as primal as they are humorous — her little ladies made out of colorful shapes may not be conventionally beautiful, but they have a certain sassiness to them. The exhibition offers a taste of the wide spectrum that the vague and fluid concept of “femininity” can fall under.
■ Yesart Air Gallery (意識畫廊), 2F, 48, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 7, Taipei City (台北市中山北路七段48號2樓), tel: (02) 2876-3858. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 2pm to 8pm
■ Until March 29
Photo courtesy of Digital Art Center
Sometimes we need to escape from reality to ground ourselves again. Chou Tung-yen’s (周東彥) solo exhibition hones in on this simple idea. His wide-angle landscape videography shot from aerial perspectives helps us see how small our problems are in the large scheme of the physical world. As the camera lens zooms out, viewers feel as if they are lifted from the weight of the world. Escape, Chou believes, is not a bad thing per se, especially if we use it as reflective time. Named ESC—Escape Practice (ESC—暫離練習), after the escape key on a computer keyboard, the exhibition is currently on display at the Barry Room in Taipei Artist Village.
■ Barry Room, Taipei Artist Village (台北國際藝術村百里廳), 7 Beiping E Rd, Taipei City (台北市北平東路7號), tel: (02) 3393-7377. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 9pm
■ Until April 12
Photo courtesy of VT Art Salon
The Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts is bringing visitors on an epic seafaring journey. A Voyage to South (海外展) visually catalogs immigration into and emigration out of Taiwan over the past few centuries through a collection maritime and travel-themed artwork by mostly contemporary artists. The exhibition shows how concepts of “home,” “local” and “foreign” are in constant flux. Various travelers have passed through Taiwan — Chinese, Western missionaries, the Japanese — and “locals” have left to build lives in other countries. In other words, Taiwan is used as an example to show that globalization is not as new as we would like to think.
■ Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (高雄市立美術館 KMFA), 80 Meishuguan Rd, Kaohsiung (高雄市美術館路80號), tel: (07) 555-0331. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9am to 5pm
■ Until April 26
Known for his award-winning photography of elaborate stage trucks with blinding neon lights used by traveling cabaret troupes around Taiwan, Shen Chao-liang (沈昭良) is back with another exhibition at the National Chengchi University Arts Center in Taipei. Organized by Aki Gallery (也趣藝廊), the latest installment of Stage (春分舞台) depicts scenes that are ever the more ostentatious – a stage truck rests behind rows of skewered pigs in one particular picture. Shen manages to aptly capture the traveling lives of the cabaret entertainers without photographing human subjects. The stages assume an eerie life of their own, illuminating desolate spaces. If you’re into the weird and the wacky, this exhibition is not to be missed.
■ National Chengchi University Arts Center, 5F Arts Space (國立政治大學藝文中心五樓藝文空間), 5F, 64, Zhinan Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市指南路二段64號5樓), tel (Aki Gallery): (02) 2599-1171 Open Mondays to Friday from 11am to 5pm
■ Until May 2
Young animator-artist Mores Zhan (張徐展) currently has a riveting solo exhibition at Taipei’s Digital Art Center entitled Black Contemporary Animation (自卑的蝙蝠). His animated Web site (www.mores-zhan.com), which will make your eyes cross and your insides jiggle, say much about the artist’s work itself. A cross between Edvard Munch, a pagan sacrifice ritual and a delightful dose of sexual innuendo, the paper dolls might be difficult for some to stomach. On the other hand, those who enjoy in-your-face grotesque humor, will absolutely appreciate the exhibition.
■ Digital Art Center (台北數位藝術中心), 180 Fuhua Rd, Taipei City (台北市福華路180號), tel: (02) 7736-0708. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm
■ Until May 3
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
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