This weekend at Cathay United Art Center, veteran Taiwanese artist Yang Yung-fu (楊永福), opens his solo painting exhibition, Dusk Veiled Autumn (輕霞秋日). Yang is a prolific painter who has devoted much of his career to exploring the natural scenery and streetscapes of Taiwan. In this exhibition, he shows over 100 recent paintings that follow this thematic pursuit. His works are often praised to have cultural significance, featuring historical buildings and picturesque local sights. Working primarily plein air, Yang emphasizes the art of picture making. He plays with contours, shapes and color, and chooses scenery that he finds first and foremost visually interesting. Aside from this ongoing pursuit of painting in situ, Yang also presents in this exhibition recent, studio-based paintings that depict his collection of late Ming, early Qing Dynasty clothing. Longevity Like A Pine (松鶴康齡), for example, is a large still-life portrait of a women’s garment decorated with rich embroidery, accompanied by traditional Chinese baskets and a backdrop of calligraphy. In this series, Yang incorporates Chinese symbols of blessing, including white cranes and pine trees, which send messages of abundance and goodwill.
■ Cathay United Art Center (國泰世華藝術中心), 7F, 236, Dunhua N Rd, Taipei City (台北市敦化北路236號7樓), tel: (02) 2717-0988. Opens Monday to Saturday from 10am to 6pm
■ Until Nov. 25
Photo Courtesy of Cathay United Art Center
Chung He-hsien (鐘和憲) is a young Taiwanese artist who creates meticulous 3D renditions of fantastical worlds inhabited by monstrous creatures. The title of his current solo exhibition Loser Gem (敗犬的寶玉) is a spinoff of a rare collectable gem featured in the popular role-playing video game Monster Hunter. While this particular gem can be perceived as malice or treasure depending on differing point of views, Chung finds it to be a fitting metaphor for his ongoing interest in the translations of meanings and values in the course of dissemination. Loser Gem is also the name of the exhibition’s featured project, a multi-media installation composed of hand sketches, video, original soundtrack and a VR component. The VR component allows you to gain access to a secret part of the project, hidden in a virtual locked safe. “This is a very personal work for me,” says the artist as he recounts the heartbreaking loss of a friend who had first inspired the soundtrack and hand sketches involved in the project. The hidden part of the project may take some effort to attain, and the outcome may or may not be deserving of the term gem. This social game experiment may produce a spectrum of opinions, and these different ways of seeing is precisely what Chung is most interested in.
■ To Dear Alternative Gallery (小路上), 7, Ln 77, Roosevelt Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路三段77巷7號), tel: (02) 2363-7768. Opens Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 9pm
■ Until tomorrow
Photo Courtesy of Link Lion
At the manga and illustration-focused gallery Mangasick, Kyoto-based underground artist Em Nishizuka is showing a selection of 20 colorful watercolors on paper, Egg Shell, that reveal her ongoing interest in the interaction among plants, insects and humans. Within these pictures, Em seeks to find the perfect balance between the naturally repulsive quality of insects and the innocent purity of teenage boys and girls. Her colors are often richly warm, sometimes shy and subtle, and other times cold and lifeless. Between these contrasting elements, Em considers her search for equilibrium as a compassionate act of embrace, as if to seek a new state of understanding between humans and nature. The piece Egg Shell depicts a nonchalant young girl cuddling a giant caterpillar on a bed of flowers. The caterpillar lightly touches the young girl’s lips while she stares without focus into the distance. Em is interested in exploring an alternative softness, and her characters often posses a sense of melancholy and fragility that seems to characterize the age of adolescence. This show is Em’s first exhibition in Taipei.
■ Mangasick, B1, 2, Alley 10, Ln 244, Roosevelt Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路3段244巷10弄2號B1), tel: (02) 2369-9969. Opens Thursdays to Tuesdays from 2pm to 10pm
■ Until Nov. 28
Photo Courtesy of Mangasick
Catch the last week of Toumei (透明), a glass exhibition by Fukuoka-based duo Baku Takahashi and Tomoko Wada. Working with glass for over a decade, the team remains fascinated by the ever-changing material and continues to find new discoveries and challenges within the medium. Their works are predominantly sculptural forms and assemblages that are playful and imaginative. Takahashi is particularly skilled in working with glass at its melting point, when the material is both malleable and solid. He often starts with a large number of sketches, drawing inspiration from daily life and the subconscious. Takashi says it is important to maintain a good mood in order create the humor in his work. Wada, on the other hand, creates arrangements of small glass fragments, often laid out in the confines of an architectural shape. Her work explores the dynamics of space structured by a poetic rhythm. For Wada, her works do not embody a concrete meaning and encourage the viewer’s free interpretation and appreciation.
■ Lion Link (雄獅星空), 2F, 9 Nanjing W Rd, Taipei City (台北市南京西路9號2樓), tel: (02) 2523-6173. Opens Tuesdays to Fridays from 1pm to 8pm, Saturdays and Sundays from 10am to 6pm.
■ Until tomorrow
Photo Courtesy of Artist
Our Ki-Lrigan Story House (咱的唭哩岸故事庄) is an exhibition organized by Ki-Lrigan Culture Studio (唭哩岸文化工作室), a grassroots project that seeks to promote community engagement and historical preservation in Ki-Lrigan, an old neighborhood in Beitou District (北投區). While Beitou has developed into a hot spring tourist attraction, awareness of its historical memories and cultural developments are in need of improvement. Ki-Lrigan is a distinct area of Beitou that holds a 300 year-old legacy of quarrying. The Ki-Lrigan stone is appreciated for its dense quartz content, which makes it highly fire resistant. Stone excavation began in the Qing Dynasty and continued until the 1980s. At its height, there were up to 10 quarries active in the area. The exhibition features creative displays and artworks created by cultural workers participating in Ki Lrigan Culture Studio’s storytelling training program. Highlights in the show include documentation of oral histories, original songs about the district’s history and preserved artifacts that were vital to the quarrying industry.
■ Mooring in Qilian (來唭投-唭哩岸社區共生空間), 265 Zunxian St, Taipei City (台北市尊賢街265號), tel: 0917-678-090. Please contact space for opening hours.
■ Until Nov. 26
Growing up in a rural, religious community in western Canada, Kyle McCarthy loved hockey, but once he came out at 19, he quit, convinced being openly gay and an active player was untenable. So the 32-year-old says he is “very surprised” by the runaway success of Heated Rivalry, a Canadian-made series about the romance between two closeted gay players in a sport that has historically made gay men feel unwelcome. Ben Baby, the 43-year-old commissioner of the Toronto Gay Hockey Association (TGHA), calls the success of the show — which has catapulted its young lead actors to stardom -- “shocking,” and says
The 2018 nine-in-one local elections were a wild ride that no one saw coming. Entering that year, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was demoralized and in disarray — and fearing an existential crisis. By the end of the year, the party was riding high and swept most of the country in a landslide, including toppling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in their Kaohsiung stronghold. Could something like that happen again on the DPP side in this year’s nine-in-one elections? The short answer is not exactly; the conditions were very specific. However, it does illustrate how swiftly every assumption early in an
Inside an ordinary-looking townhouse on a narrow road in central Kaohsiung, Tsai A-li (蔡阿李) raised her three children alone for 15 years. As far as the children knew, their father was away working in the US. They were kept in the dark for as long as possible by their mother, for the truth was perhaps too sad and unjust for their young minds to bear. The family home of White Terror victim Ko Chi-hua (柯旗化) is now open to the public. Admission is free and it is just a short walk from the Kaohsiung train station. Walk two blocks south along Jhongshan
Francis William White, an Englishman who late in the 1860s served as Commissioner of the Imperial Customs Service in Tainan, published the tale of a jaunt he took one winter in 1868: A visit to the interior of south Formosa (1870). White’s journey took him into the mountains, where he mused on the difficult terrain and the ease with which his little group could be ambushed in the crags and dense vegetation. At one point he stays at the house of a local near a stream on the border of indigenous territory: “Their matchlocks, which were kept in excellent order,
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