IT Park Gallery has been transformed into a wooly underwater world thanks to Tsui Hui-yu’s (崔惠宇) knitted coral installations. Fulfilling Silence (沈默最滿) continues Tsui’s explorations into the depths of her unconscious, with her thoughts and desires manifesting themselves in reefs, algae and sea creatures set against a backdrop of her colorful ink drawings which appear to be a meshing of plant parts and human limbs — though not in a revolting way. The broken fragments seem to represent the artist trying to make sense of the world around her, but there’s also a sense of letting go and learning to appreciate the randomness of nature for what it is.
■ IT Park Gallery (伊通公園), 2F-3F, 41 Yitong St, Taipei City (台北市伊通街41號2-3樓), tel: (02) 2507-7243. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 1pm to 10pm
■ Until Jan. 7
Photo courtesy of MOCA
On display at Digital Art Center is ~ / !, a solo exhibition by Lin Pei-ying (林沛瑩). Lin is one of the co-founders of the Taiwanese BioArt Community (台灣生物藝術社群), a group that seeks to bring together artists and scientists through events like salons, book clubs and even speed dating between artists and scientists. She frequently uses living organisms in her own work, combining art and biotechnology. PSX Consultancy, which stands for “Plant Sex Consultancy,” looks at how plants reproduce and draws comparisons and contrasts to how humans have sex. In Smallpox Syndrome, Lin imagines how vaccines will evolve in the future and in Minimal Nano Diet, she imagines a world where humans are consuming primarily nano-food, or food that is cultivated, processed or pacakaged by nanotechnology.
■ 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 Jan. 27
Photo courtesy of Metaphysical Art Gallery
Post Ecolonialism Project (後植民計畫) began in 2010 when Chen Hung-yi (陳泓易) started planting trees in ecological hotspots — places where the environment is under threat — throughout Taiwan. He was soon joined by artists and students who planted trees in places that were devastated by typhoons. The project soon morphed into a traveling exhibition, stopping in the Bois des Moutiers in France earlier this year, before making its current stop at Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (台北當代藝術館, MOCA, Taipei). The videos see the act of tree-planting as a metaphor for updating and re-examining the genre of Chinese landscape painting.
■ Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (台北當代藝術館, MOCA, Taipei), 39 Changan W Rd, Taipei City (台北市長安西路39號), tel: (02) 2552-3720. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm
■ Until Jan. 15
Photo courtesy of Metaphysical Art Gallery
The Extension of Medium (媒材的性格擴張), which opens at Nunu Fine Art on Sunday, will exhibit the work of artists from around the world whose practice attempts to alter our ideas artistic mediums. The exhibition includes German artist Peter Zimmermann’s paintings of colorful blotches that resemble pigmentation on the screen of a smartphone or laptop, over which he sprays a glossy coat of epoxy resin. Belgian artist Stijn Ank’s plaster sculptures look like minimalistic 3D paintings. The works of six artists from the Philippines will be featured as well and they range from Yeo Kaa’s upbeat, florescent paintings of grotesque yet magical creatures to Johanna Helmuth’s dark, monochrome paintings of erotically-charged scenes.
■ Nunu Fine Art (路由藝術), 5, Ln 67, Jinshan S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市金山南路1段67巷5號), tel: (02) 3322-6207. Open Wednesdays to Sundays from noon to 7pm
■ Opens Sunday. Until Feb. 5
Photo courtesy of Digital Art Center
Traces of Beads (水珠的痕跡), a selection of paintings by South Korean artist Kim Tschang-yuel, begins tomorrow at Metaphysical Art Gallery. The 86-year-old Kim was one of the “founding fathers” of the Korean monochrome movement known as Danseakhwa, which sought to reconcile the country’s cultural identity with that of western notions of modernity. The movement also stressed simplicity and many Danseakhwa painters indeed spent their lives painting a single stripe across blank canvases. Kim, however, has dedicated his life to something more exciting — painting water droplets, including water droplets against blank backdrops and set against backdrops with Chinese characters. Decades of practice must have paid off because his water droplets are eerily realistic.
■ 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
■ Opens tomorrow. Until Feb. 26
Photo courtesy of IT Park Gallery
Photo courtesy of Digital Art Center
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,
The recent decline in average room rates is undoubtedly bad news for Taiwan’s hoteliers and homestay operators, but this downturn shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. According to statistics published by the Tourism Administration (TA) on March 3, the average cost of a one-night stay in a hotel last year was NT$2,960, down 1.17 percent compared to 2023. (At more than three quarters of Taiwan’s hotels, the average room rate is even lower, because high-end properties charging NT$10,000-plus skew the data.) Homestay guests paid an average of NT$2,405, a 4.15-percent drop year on year. The countrywide hotel occupancy rate fell from
In late December 1959, Taiwan dispatched a technical mission to the Republic of Vietnam. Comprising agriculturalists and fisheries experts, the team represented Taiwan’s foray into official development assistance (ODA), marking its transition from recipient to donor nation. For more than a decade prior — and indeed, far longer during Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rule on the “mainland” — the Republic of China (ROC) had received ODA from the US, through agencies such as the International Cooperation Administration, a predecessor to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). More than a third of domestic investment came via such sources between 1951
March 24 to March 30 When Yang Bing-yi (楊秉彝) needed a name for his new cooking oil shop in 1958, he first thought of honoring his previous employer, Heng Tai Fung (恆泰豐). The owner, Wang Yi-fu (王伊夫), had taken care of him over the previous 10 years, shortly after the native of Shanxi Province arrived in Taiwan in 1948 as a penniless 21 year old. His oil supplier was called Din Mei (鼎美), so he simply combined the names. Over the next decade, Yang and his wife Lai Pen-mei (賴盆妹) built up a booming business delivering oil to shops and
RSS