Beijing-born, Taipei-based artist Yolanda Pong (龐銚) has made a name for herself mixing paint and metal to create black-and-gray (and sometimes copper-infused) abstract artwork. It’s interesting that Pong is always grouped in joint exhibitions where the theme is femininity because her style is bold and brazen rather than cute and delicate. Yet her artwork, as shown in her solo show Beyond Black, White & Gray (黑白與灰之外), still exudes a chic industrial sensibility — paint appears to be splashing in all directions on her canvas but it is controlled chaos.
■ Ever Harvest Art Gallery (日升月鴻畫廊), 2F, 107, Renai Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市仁愛路四段107號2樓), tel: (02) 2752-2353. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10:30am to 6:30pm
■ Until Sept. 26
Photo courtesy of Metaphysical Art Gallery
Benrei Huang (黃本蕊) manages to capture the fancy of every adult who used to have imaginary friends or pets (don’t judge — I’m an only child) in her paintings of Nini the bunny who always finds itself stumbling into humorous situations based on Huang’s real-life experiences. The former children’s book illustrator continues to translate her cute and whimsical storytelling into her artwork. Huang’s latest series, Om at the Breakfast Table (餐桌上的枯山水), is based on her travels around Japan, specifically the many rock gardens she visited. Although Japanese rock gardens appear to be relatively simple in design, they are in fact the product of centuries of study devoted to aesthetics. In these paintings, Nini sits in the middle of the rock gardens, seemingly trying to comprehend the enormity of its history. In other paintings, Nini collapses on dining tables — an allusion to a problem that Huang has of eating too much when traveling.
■ Eslite Gallery (誠品畫廊), 5F, 11 Songgao Rd, Taipei City (台北市松高路11號5樓), tel: (02) 8789-3388. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Until Oct. 4
Photo courtesy of Metaphysical Art Gallery
Thou Shalt not Self-pollute (自瀆有礙身心之說不可信) is a satirical take on contemporary mass media’s constant policing of sexuality and people’s bodies. Held at two different locations in Tainan (Absolute Art Space and the Fotoaura Institute of Photography), the exhibition features Su Hui-yu’s (蘇匯宇) semi-pornographic works depicting the good that sex, porn and masturbation can do for us. Su seeks to extricate the notion of the human body being associated with shame and does so in a manner that is elegantly beautiful. Playing with light and darkness, some of his subjects resemble transcended beings while others appear more sinister. Far from the trite good vs evil trope, however, Su succeeds at capturing the intricate trifecta that people tend to associate sex with: desire, shame and a sense of becoming acquainted with your own body.
■ Absolute Art Space (絕對空間), 11, Lane 205, Minsheng Rd Sec 1, Tainan (台南市民生路一段205巷11號), tel: (06) 223-3508, open from Wednesdays to Fridays 12pm to 8pm and Saturdays and Sundays from 2pm to 8pm
■ Fotoaura Institute of Photography (海馬迴光畫館), 2F, 83 Chenggong Rd, Tainan (台南市成功路83號2樓), tel: (06) 222-3495. Open Wednesdays to Sundays from 1pm to 8pm
Photo courtesy of Eslite Gallery
* Until Oct. 4
Post-Objectivity (後客觀) features 13 East Asian artists whose unconventional and sometimes controversial art have pushed the boundaries of acceptance towards modern art in the region over the last two decades. It includes work from the early 1990s by Wu Tien-chang (吳天章), just a few years after the lifting of Martial Law. These oil paintings of cannons and forts comprise of some of his first stabs at sociopolitical commentary on Taiwan and China. The works of Chinese artist Tang Zhigang (唐志岡), who once served in the People’s Liberation Army, complements well with Wu Tien-chang’s work. Tang, who is most well-known for his paintings of children conducting business transactions, provides a humorous pop art take on the pseudo-reality that is serving in the Chinese military. South Korean artist Kwon Ki-soo overlaps smiley-face cartoons against backgrounds of classical Korean paintings. Kwon proves that traversing tradition and modernity does not need to be a serious or solemn endeavor — his cute cartoons are educative in their own way. Finally Yoshitaka Amano’s silly anime drawings which have assumed pop icon status, are on display too – because you can’t feature Japanese art without throwing in some anime.
■ Metaphysical Art Gallery (形而上畫廊), 7F, 219, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段219號7樓), tel: (02) 2771-3236. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 6:30pm
Photo courtesy of Metaphysical Art Gallery
■ Opens tomorrow. Until Oct. 11
For the artistic duo Anderson & Low — which comprises of Jonathan Anderson and Ediwn Low — athletes have been their muse since the beginning of their collaboration in 1990. Their latest exhibition, Heavenly Bodies, which is on display at Taipei’s Bluerider Art features (mostly nude) photographs of the National Danish Gymnastic Team (NDGT) doing aerial contortions, hand stands and other mind-blogging limb-twisting poses. Their elegant and graceful photos, which are printed manually on silver gelatin paper, prove that sports and art are not worlds apart as some may think. On another note, they also prove that nudity doesn’t necessarily have to be associated with sex.
■ Bluerider Art (藍騎士藝術空間), 9F, 25-1, Renai Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市仁愛路四段25-1號9樓), tel: (02) 2752-2238. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 9am to 6pm
■ Until Oct. 17
The 2015 Digital Art Curatorial Exhibition Program — Internet Implosions (網路後巷—國際非網路藝術展2015) held in Taichung’s National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, is currently showcasing the works of eight global artists working in digital media and other media with the theme of traversing the real world and virtual reality. The work takes a humorous but at times cynical examination of the ridiculous that the internet age has spawned — including the flowery but hollow jargon of online marketing, the bizarre “causes” that crowdsourcing has helped to fund, and of course, the narcissism that social media has helped to breed. Consequently, important questions such as how the Internet has changed social structures and the way we interact with one another, are raised.
■ DigiArk, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2, Wuquan W Rd Sec 1, 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. 15
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
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