For a special exhibition about ancient Egyptian life and its funerary practices, visit the National Palace Museum’s current show Egyptian Mummies from the British Museum: Exploring Ancient Lives. The exhibition features six individuals who lived in Egypt from circa 900 BC to 180 AD. “They have been carefully chosen to throw light on different aspects of life and death along the banks of the Nile,” states the museum. With new scanning technology and other non-invasive analysis techniques, the British Museum has discovered new information about the mummified individuals, including their age, causes of death and other knowledge about their lives. Highlights in the exhibition include four deity-protected limestone vessels used to preserve the deceased person’s organs so that they could be used in the afterlife; a statue of Anubis, a funerary god who resembles a canine and safeguards the burial grounds; and the mummy of a young elite child wearing a gilded mask and holding a bouquet of roses and myrtle.
■ National Palace Museum (故宮博物院), 221, Zhishan Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市至善路二段221號), tel: (02) 2881-2021. Open Mondays to Fridays from 9am to 5pm
■ Through Feb. 18
Photo Courtesy of Yo-Chang Art Museum
Mind Set Art Center begins the year with a group exhibition that reflects on the general state of agitation in the world today. According to a statement by the gallery, “The world is overflowing with information, national boundaries are blurred, and the remains of history blend with the imagination of the future.” Chaos (混沌劇場) features 20 recent paintings by three Taiwanese and Chinese artists born between the late 70s and early 80s. While Rao Fu (傅饒), Jhong Jiang-ze (鐘江澤) and Tang Jo-hung (黨若洪) work with different painting methods and interests, they share a pictorial affinity to “chaotic tension and dynamics.” Rao is a Dresden-based Chinese artist whose paintings of abstract figures in dark landscapes are often treated in a manner that blends the aesthetics of Western romanticism and Chinese landscape painting. Using a combination of oil paints and bitumen, Fu’s expressive washes and wide brushstrokes open ominous, boundless spaces for contemplation. Jhong’s Pupa depicts a reclining nude woman enshrouded by layers of turbulent brushstrokes. His paintings are luminous, often preferring fragmented compositions that suggest a movement towards disintegration and a release of energy. Tang’s Youth with a Walking Stick is a painting of a thoughtful gentleman dressed in suit posing against an anxious, red-and-blue striped backdrop.
■ Mind Set Art Center (安卓藝術) 108, Heping E Rd, Taipei City (台北市和平東路108號), tel: (02) 2365-6008. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 11am to 6pm
■ Through Feb. 10
Photo courtesy of TKG+
While exhibitions and performances are commonly understood as categorically separate art forms, the group exhibition Air Plant (空氣草) organized by the National Taiwan University of Arts (國立台灣藝術大學) seeks to create an opportunity for dialogue between the two fields of practice. The show includes 22 artists from France, the US, Sweden and Taiwan who work in either or both fields and present in this exhibition collaborative or individual artworks or performances. Curated by Chang Chun-yi (張君懿), the exhibition space is inhabited by art objects and props, art installations and theatrical spaces as well as actions and performances during scheduled times. The exhibition title refers to a type of vegetation that does not need soil to grow. Chang takes the plant’s ability to survive without rooting into soil as a metaphor for the resilience and adaption of artists to different conditions. French dance choreographer Christian Rizzo creates a staged space that features objects, symbols and documentation of his performance art projects in the last 15 years. Riverbed Theatre (河床劇團) presents a new, Freud-inspired work that invites the viewers to wander in a dream-like narrative between reality and imagination.
■ Yo-Chang Art Museum (有章藝術博物館), 59, Daguan Rd Sec 1, Banqiao Dist, New Taipei City (新北市板橋區大關路一段59號), tel: (02) 2272-2181 ext. 2454. Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 10am to 5pm
■ Through Jan. 14
Photo Courtesy of National Palace Museum
Extrastellar Evaluations III: Entropy: 25800 (超星鑑定III：熵：25800) is a solo exhibition by Chen Yin-ju (陳瀅如) with an unnerving premise: “As doomsday draws near, will humanity realize the catastrophic consequences of its actions and attain the final awakening before it is too late?” The artist is known for her explorations of occultist topics such an extraterrestrial myths and cosmography, and in this exhibition she reveals a new prediction of doomsday through a study of several ancient myths and NASA calculations. The exhibition features a single-channel video that includes historical images of wars and disasters, spiritual narrations and scientific predictions of the world’s fate. On view are also charcoal drawings that depict meticulously drawn, geometrical patterns suggestive of cosmological calculations.
■ TKG+, B1, 15, Ruiguang Rd Ln 548, Taipei City (台北市瑞光路548巷15號B1), tel: (02) 2659-0798. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Through Feb. 14
Photo courtesy of Liang Gallery
Naotsugu Yoshida is a Japanese ceramicist who creates handcrafted, monochromatic cups, bowls, vases, and other containers with a minimalist aesthetic. Yoshida makes it clear that he is not creating art — with a reductive approach to his craft, the ceramicist takes away qualities that express individual personality to reveal the more basic virtues of his ceramic work. Yoshida’s current exhibition at Xiaoqi +g shows a selection of his most recent works, which continue his discipline in black, white and gray containers that are fired his studio at the foothills of Mount Fuji. This is his fourth exhibition with the gallery; the regular appearance of his work allows familiar viewers to witness the subtle developments in his craft.
■ Xiaoqi +g (小器藝廊), 4, Ln 17, Chifeng St, Taipei City (台北市赤峰街17巷4號), tel: (02) 2559-9260. Open daily from 12pm to 8pm
■ Through Jan. 10
Feces, vomit and fossilized food from inside stomachs have provided new clues into how dinosaurs rose to dominate Earth, a new study revealed on Wednesday. Scientists have discovered plenty about dinosaurs — particularly about how they vanished off the face of the planet 66 millions years ago. But “we know very little about their rise,” said Martin Qvarnstrom, a researcher at Sweden’s Uppsala University and the study’s lead author. Dinosaurs first appeared at least 230 million years ago, fossils have shown. But they would not become the world’s dominant animal until the start of the Jurassic Period some 30 million years later. What caused this
The Mountains to Sea National Greenway (山海圳國家綠道) draws its name from the idea that each hiker starting at the summit of Jade Mountain (玉山) and following the trail to the coast is like a single raindrop. Together, many raindrops form life and prosperity-bringing waterways. Replicating a raindrop’s journey holds poetic beauty, but all hikers know that climbing is infinitely more appealing, and so this installment picks up where the last one left off — heading inland and uphill along the 49.8-kilometer Canal Trail (大圳之路) — second of the Greenway’s four sections. A detailed map of the trail can be found
“Bro, I can’t wait for my first dead body,” wrote an 11-year-old boy on Instagram in Sweden, where gangs recruit children too young to be prosecuted as contract killers on chat apps. “Stay motivated, it’ll come,” answered his 19-year-old contact. He went on to offer the child 150,000 kronor (US$13,680) to carry out a murder, as well as clothes and transport to the scene of the crime, according to a police investigation of the exchange last year in the western province of Varmland. In this case, four men aged 18 to 20 are accused of recruiting four minors aged 11 to 17
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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