Ceramic artist Tseng Tai-yang (曾泰洋) creates earthy pieces of pottery for his latest exhibition, Journey to the Stars (星際遨遊), at New Taipei City’s Yingge Ceramics Museum. The ceramics on display represent the five elements in Chinese philosophy — earth, fire, water, wood and metal — and each piece emanates a calm and meditative feel. The purpose, according to the museum, is to show the endless possibilities of ceramics, notably its aesthetic and even spiritual value. The exhibition’s name and description might be a bit of a stretch — “a song of the trials of earth” — but Tseng’s ceramics really are pretty, especially the tiny ones that look like potted plants.
■ Yingge Ceramics Museum (鶯歌陶瓷博物館), 200 Wenhua Rd, New Taipei City (新北市文化路200號), tel: (02) 8677-2727. Open Mondays to Fridays from 9:30am to 5pm, Saturdays and Sundays from 9:30am to 6pm, closed first Monday of the month
■ Until Dec. 20
Video artist Hsiao Mei-ling (蕭美玲), who lived and studied in France, has a new exhibition opening at Taipei’s Digital Art Center tomorrow. Entitled Souvenirs Revenants (彼方 / 視逝), it consists of a series of video installations in which Hsiao projects MRI scans of her brain alongside video footage of her personal life, as well as streets and airports around France and Taiwan. Throughout the screening, memories blur and time frames overlap, the result of which makes the viewer feel like he or she is standing in multiple places at the same time. It’s obvious that Hsiao misses France, and the artwork is, in part, an attempt to reconcile both parts of her identity.
■ 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
■ Opens tomorrow. Until Dec. 27
Photo courtesy of Digital Art Center
Short-term Memory (暫存記憶) is a joint exhibition at Taipei Artist Village by various artists from around the world, including Julien Coignet, Humberto Duque and Kaensan Rattanasomerk, working in a variety of mediums, from painting to sculptural installation. As you may have guessed, it centers on short-term memory, especially its inaccuracies and biases. We tend to categorize things in order of importance, and often times the details and “facts” we deem as unimportant are filtered into our short-term memories. In other words, short term memory is similar to photography in the sense that it captures snippets of reality or elements of truth. The exhibition, which is at once both scientific and artistic, does a fine job at obfuscating truth and revealing what we choose to forget.
■ 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 Jan. 3
Photo courtesy of Project Fulfill Art Space
Hong Kong artist Lee Kit’s (李傑) homely style of depicting working-class domestic simplicity — worn-out bedsheets and table cloths are a fixture in his installations — and Lai Chih-sheng’s (賴志盛) obsession with dismantling old structures and piecing them back together in new ways, form the perfect symbiosis in their joint exhibition, At (就在), at Project Fulfill Art Space. Like most of the gallery’s shows, it is minimalistic and conceptual — as in you sometimes think that you’re looking at a blank wall, when it is, indeed, a piece of art. The title alludes to the gallery’s Chinese name, which connotes a sense of being present in the moment. The message is as simple as that: enjoy the moment, regardless of how modest it is.
■ Project Fulfill Art Space (就在藝術空間), 2, Alley 45, Ln 147, Xinyi Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市信義路三段147巷45弄2號), tel: (02) 2707-6942. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 1pm to 6pm
■ Jan. 10
The prints of emerging artist Huang Chih-cheng (黃至正) evoke a sense of nostalgia for the age of exploration and discovery. Maps overlaid with ink blotches and scientific-looking diagrams of anything from insects to buildings conjure up the feeling of an intrepid traveler trying to make sense of the world. In fact, Huang’s intention is to capture the relationship between humans, animals and nature, thus the voyage motif can be seen as allegorical, as the real journey is one of self-discovery. Huang’s prints uphold the old adage that through the “other,” we can better understand ourselves. His artwork is currently on display at Taipei’s A Gallery, in an exhibition entitled Roaming the Shores (彼岸遊蕩).
■ A Gallery (當代一畫廊), 22, Alley 36, Lane 147, Xinyi Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市信義路三段147巷36弄22號), tel: (02) 2702-3327. Open Mondays to Saturdays from 10am to 6pm
■ Until Jan. 16
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It is dangerous to engage in business in China now, and those considering engaging with it should pay close attention to the example Taiwanese businesspeople are setting. Though way down from the heady days of Taiwanese investments in China two decades ago, a few hundred thousand Taiwanese continue to live, work and study there, but the numbers have been declining fast. As President William Lai (賴清德) pointed out approvingly to a visiting American Senate delegation, China accounted for 80 percent of the total overseas investment in 2011, but was reduced to just 11.4 percent last year. That is a big drop.
Dec 2 to Dec 8 It was the biggest heist in Taiwanese history at that time. In the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1982, two masked men armed with M16 assault rifles knocked out the driver of a United World Chinese Commercial Bank (世華銀行) security van, making away with NT$14 million (worth about NT$30 million today). The van had been parked behind a post office at Taipei’s Minsheng E Road when the robbers struck, and despite the post office being full of customers, nobody inside had noticed the brazen theft. “Criminals robbing a
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