Eslite Gallery is currently showing Metamorphoses Lecture Proposal (變形記演講計畫), a solo exhibition eight years in the making by Taiwanese artist Kuo Wen-shyang (郭文祥). Beginning in the 80’s, Kuo spent many years in Barcelona and France, where he studied a variety of mediums, including drawing, film and printmaking. His present show features a series of prints divided into five chapter: melancholy, harmony, existence, freedom and emptiness. Through these stages, the artist interprets the idea of metamorphosis through several classic French literary masterpieces including those of Arthur Rimbaud, Albert Camus, Honore de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire and Czech-born German novelist Franz Kafka. “In a world of metamorphoses, things are at once real and dreamlike, while individuals undergo various states of mind as they transform physically and perhaps psychologically,” writes the gallery in a statement. Kuo’s prints are accompanied by fragmented excerpts that Kuo selected from fellow artist Luo Pin-che (羅品?)’s poetry book. “A poetry book is the cemetery of words, and the artist is the tomb raider,” writes the gallery. Through Kuo’s act of deconstruction, “the riddled, fragmented phrases… call for the history and the goodness of the past.”
■ 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 Aug. 26
Photo Courtesy of Eslite Gallery
Lee Tzu-hsun (李子勳) is a Beijing-based Taiwanese artist who works between a number of art disciplines, including painting, sculpture, architecture, stage design and performance art. The multiplicity of his practice allows him room to explore a combined potential of expressivity and new possibilities. “I don’t believe that there is a clearly defined world; hence I have always been fascinated by the un-definable,” says the artist. The title of the show, The Alien Galaxy (異星系), suggests a search for an unfamiliar, parallel world and an interest in ideas of cosmic order. “My art has always been about the researching, analyzing, hypothesizing and reassembling of this, like being in an open process of growth, forever and endlessly shaping a new world,” Lee says. The exhibition features a selection of works from different stages of his career, including Sequential Aircraft, a new series of wall-hung, metallic sculptures that are meant to resemble industrially produced flying machines. According to the museum, these forms are biomimetic creations that “are interposed between life form and non-life form.” Mystery of the Glass Beads is a kinetic installation that takes on the theme of universal order with 1,500 marbles that gradually shift position pushed by the movement of three highly stylized mechanical objects.
■ Taipei Fine Arts Museum (台北市立美術館 TFAM), 181, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 3, Taipei (台北市中山北路三段181號), tel: (02) 2595-7656. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9:30am to 5:30pm and until 8:30pm on Saturdays
■ Until Oct. 14
Photo Courtesy of Whitestone Gallery
10th anniversary, Banana tree, Memorial, Sulfur, Storytelling, Arrangement, Perfect, Hyper trace, Third (十年、椰子、芭蕉樹、紀念、硫磺、說故事、安排、美好、幻聲跡、第三) is the third iteration in a series of exhibitions that celebrates the 10th year anniversary of Project Fulfill Art Space. The presentation of the show is designed to develop over the course of five weeks, with a new work added every week. The exhibition will finally culminate in a group exhibition of five Taiwanese artists that work in painting, sculpture, story-telling, conceptual and sound art. According to the gallery, the time-based exhibition format is inspired by the art of flower arranging, which involves a process of sorting, trimming, adjusting and stylizing. It is in this context that the works by Chou Yu-cheng (周育正), Hsieh Mu-chi (謝牧岐), Syu Jia-jhen (許家禎), Yang Chi-chuan (楊季涓), Wang Fu-jui (王福瑞) will be curated into an integral display that collectively speaks to the idea of the past. Chou’s Flowers for Opening is a display of congratulatory flowers delivered to the exhibition site by art institutions; the project reflects upon the institutional networks and relationships within the art world.
■ 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
■ Until Sept. 15
Photo Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei
Dale Chihuly is an iconic American artist and entrepreneur best known for his large blown-glass sculptures and architectural installations. Chihuly has a background in interior design and sculpture and began experimenting with the art of glassblowing in the 1960’s, working with a team of glassblowers to achieve projects of great scale and complexity. Chihuly describes himself “more choreographer than dancer, more supervisor than participant, more director than actor.” His Taipei show at White Stone Gallery, CHIHULY: Taipei (奇胡利:台北), is a continuation of his March exhibition at the gallery’s Hong Kong branch with a different selection of artworks. The show features a number of projects that demonstrate the artist’s ongoing experiments with light, space and form. Chihuly manipulates glass in a variety of capacities, sometimes to form experimental paintings, wall-hung compositions or spatial installations. Rotolo is a sculptural series of glass coils wrapped around a core structure that shows off “the substantial yet intricate and delicate nature of glass,” writes the gallery. Glass on Glass is a series of paintings created by multiple enamel drawings on glass sheets layered onto one another to build up a collective composition. The exhibition features a new painting created especially for the Taipei show: Ikebana: Glass on Glass, which depicts an abstract pot of flowers against a soft background of magenta and blue.
■ White Stone Gallery (白石畫廊), 1 Jihu Rd, Taipei City (台北市基湖路1號), tel: (02) 8751-1185. Opens Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 9pm.
■ Until Sept. 23
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Curated by Huang Chien-hung (黃建宏), Trans-Justice: Para-Colonial@Technology (穿越─正義：科技＠潛殖) is a group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, that takes on the themes of global political movements, justice and the role of technology in shaping the future. Huang addresses artmaking as something that can evoke social and political change. “Artistic creativity, especially imagination on forming new relationships between individuals and the world... will be the core demand for the next phase of democracy and technological development,” he says. The show includes 12 international and Taiwanese artists, including an installation of archival material from the Nylon Cheng Memorial Museum Collection (鄭南榕紀念館館藏). The display seeks to encourage new ways of discovering and understanding the history of Cheng beyond his abstracted representation as a symbol of justice. Chinese artist Xu Tan’s (徐坦) Water, Land and Turf is an installation of eight videos and installations about his research into the Tanka people of Guangzhou and their history of land use. The project also includes an interactive component that encourages viewers to contribute their thoughts concerning the topics of his study.
■ Museum of Contemporary Art (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) 2559-6615. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm
■ Until Oct. 21
Photo Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Photo Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
As we live longer, our risk of cognitive impairment is increasing. How can we delay the onset of symptoms? Do we have to give up every indulgence or can small changes make a difference? We asked neurologists for tips on how to keep our brains healthy for life. TAKE CARE OF YOUR HEALTH “All of the sensible things that apply to bodily health apply to brain health,” says Suzanne O’Sullivan, a consultant in neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, and the author of The Age of Diagnosis. “When you’re 20, you can get away with absolute
When the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese forces 50 years ago this week, it prompted a mass exodus of some 2 million people — hundreds of thousands fleeing perilously on small boats across open water to escape the communist regime. Many ultimately settled in Southern California’s Orange County in an area now known as “Little Saigon,” not far from Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, where the first refugees were airlifted upon reaching the US. The diaspora now also has significant populations in Virginia, Texas and Washington state, as well as in countries including France and Australia.
May 5 to May 11 What started out as friction between Taiwanese students at Taichung First High School and a Japanese head cook escalated dramatically over the first two weeks of May 1927. It began on April 30 when the cook’s wife knew that lotus starch used in that night’s dinner had rat feces in it, but failed to inform staff until the meal was already prepared. The students believed that her silence was intentional, and filed a complaint. The school’s Japanese administrators sided with the cook’s family, dismissing the students as troublemakers and clamping down on their freedoms — with
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