Liang Gallery presents Entering Sekaikei — Bokurano (進入世界系：地球防衛少年), a solo exhibition by Chen I-chun (陳依純). Chen works between video, experimental animation, interactive art and painting. Her practice mainly focuses on social issues and stories that take place in industrial or marginalized areas. The Japanese term sekai-kei in the exhibition title literally means world-type and refers to a form of animation, cartoon, game or light novel that deals with human relationships in a world of crisis. Such stories have no affiliation to a specific nationality or society. The exhibition features a selection of screen-based works, paintings, video and sound that speak to a collective story of inner hardships. For this show, Chen interviewed a number of people about their thoughts on war. Each participant answered the question, “Hey, Siri, what is war?” In this work, many young people speak about emotional suffering and the daily struggles that they face. “These [shared] hardships blur the boundaries between country and society, thus we can see a bigger world,” writes the gallery in a release. Weaving together an emotional fabric, the show draws connections between people as they work independently towards a life of perseverance.
■ Liang Gallery (尊彩藝術中心), 366, Ruiguang Rd, Taipei City (台北市瑞光路366號), tel: (02) 2797-1100. Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 6pm
■ Tomorrow to Sept 30
Photo Courtesy of Wildflower Bookstore
Catch the last weekend of Morning Anxiety’s (日安焦慮) exhibition A Field Guide to the Unknown (異星圖鑑) at Wildflower Bookstore. The show is a spectacular feast of mark-making and sci-fi motifs blown up to life-size scale. Visitors enter a narrow entrance of the gallery to find a generous display of paper boulders, reliefs, over 100 original drawings and a series of 3D works inspired by the artist’s newest comic book, Road to Nowhere. The gallery describes the scene: “Gigantic rocks block the road ahead, dim light pierce through layers of mountains and cracks in rocks. Dive into the light, you discover a world of fantasies [that is] yet somehow familiar. Is what you see really what you see? Or is it still a set built of another dream?” The themes of alternative realities, fantastical adventures and exploration of the unknown make the show “an antidote of reality lost in the unknown world where there are no boundaries between virtual and real.” Morning Anxiety is the pen name of artist Ding Pao-yen (丁柏晏) under which Ding publishes independent comic zines. He is deeply influenced by subculture, comic books and printed mediums.
■ Wildflower Bookstore (荒花書店), 7, Ln 69, Chengde Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市承德路一段 69 巷7號). Open Fridays to Mondays from 2pm to 10pm
■ Through Sunday
Photo Courtesy of Donna Art & Consulting
No Sooncheon is a South Korean multidisciplinary artist with a background in sculpture. After presenting his work at Young Art Taipei last year, No returns this year to Taiwan with a solo exhibition Between Lines (線與之間) organized by Donna Art & Consulting. The show features a selection of paintings, sculptures and installations centered on the artist’s ongoing exploration of the human figure. In No’s work, the body is often treated as an abstract silhouette, or contours personified with minimal, yet expressive face features. Even his sculptures maintain a sense of flatness, which the artist describes as a purposeful “deviat[ion] from the sense of mass and weight” that draws attention to sculpture as a medium that treats both two-dimensional surfaces and three-dimensional spaces. In his writings, No speaks about his interest in creating different relationships between space, form and line. He often experiments with scale as a factor that directly affects the viewer’s way of seeing. “The size of the work expands the viewer’s range of appreciation. This fact not only allows one to perceive the physical space that the work takes, but also the mental space as a piece of work by giving the viewer a space direction,” writes the artist.
■ Donna Art & Consulting (多納藝術), 7F, 112, Keelung Rd Sec 2, Taipei City (台北市基隆路二段112號7樓), tel: (02) 7746-7463. Open Mondays to Saturdays from 11am to 7pm
■ Through Sept 22
Photo Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art
I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin (我要神、要詩、要危險、要自由、要良善、要罪惡) is a film program featured on the plaza of Taipei’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The program, with its daring title, seems to suggest a critique of modern society driven by a collection of thematic desires. According to co-curators Mark Lungley and Huang Yi-han (黃伊涵), the show consists of seven artists who explore the relationship between video and the real world while “challenging the physical and conceptual limits of what it means to live in the world today.” David Blandy’s The End of the World is a video that speaks about technology and memory. The narrative touches upon the end of the world and “a loss of connection to the server,” reads the exhibition brochure. A section of the film appropriates chat-room text from users of Asheron’s Call, a multi-player online role-playing game. Electra Lyhne-Gold’s The Self Centered is a video featuring a collectively-written script based on fictional and non-fictional events. The artist had invited several people to work on the script, which developed into a monologue delivered by an actress who plays the role of Lyhne-Gold. According to the curators, “This exhibition seeks to urge our reflection on the routines and restrictions in daily living, and to open up our imagination and thoughts for a better world.”
■ 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
■ Through Sept 30
Recent works by Japanese photographer Shinichiro Uchikura are presently on view at G. Gallery. Uchikura is an award-winning artist and grand prize winner of this year’s EMON Award for photography. The exhibition Dog Warriors & Baby — The Star of November (犬之戰士團＆十一月之星) features two black and white series that speak to the essence of life and the power of documentary photography. The first series, entitled Dog Warriors, depicts a great number of Japanese domestic dogs. These portraits reveal not only their gentle and loyal appearance, but also their aggression and animalistic nature. The exhibition statement mentions an East Asian legend about how wild wolves became domesticated by humans and eventually evolved into pets. Through this project, the artist reflects upon the process of pacification in the history of civilization. The second series Baby — The Star of November is a project that takes on a more personal subject matter — the artist’s newborn son. While taking picture of his baby, Shinichiro observes the subtle responses of his child to things in his daily life. “A single drop of eyewash was dripped into his eye, at which he cried heartily, yet he shed no tears,” writes the artist. “The movement of the body, even the crying voice; I think of as the most primitive fundamentals of life.”
■ G. Gallery (居藝廊)B1, 3, Alley 3, Ln 227, Nongan St, Taipei (台北市中山區農安街227巷3弄3號B1), tel: (02) 2501-8326. Open Wednesdays from 12pm-7pm, Thursdays to Sundays from 11am to 7pm
■ Through Sept 16
April 28 to May 4 During the Japanese colonial era, a city’s “first” high school typically served Japanese students, while Taiwanese attended the “second” high school. Only in Taichung was this reversed. That’s because when Taichung First High School opened its doors on May 1, 1915 to serve Taiwanese students who were previously barred from secondary education, it was the only high school in town. Former principal Hideo Azukisawa threatened to quit when the government in 1922 attempted to transfer the “first” designation to a new local high school for Japanese students, leading to this unusual situation. Prior to the Taichung First
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
The Ministry of Education last month proposed a nationwide ban on mobile devices in schools, aiming to curb concerns over student phone addiction. Under the revised regulation, which will take effect in August, teachers and schools will be required to collect mobile devices — including phones, laptops and wearables devices — for safekeeping during school hours, unless they are being used for educational purposes. For Chang Fong-ching (張鳳琴), the ban will have a positive impact. “It’s a good move,” says the professor in the department of
Toward the outside edge of Taichung City, in Wufeng District (霧峰去), sits a sprawling collection of single-story buildings with tiled roofs belonging to the Wufeng Lin (霧峰林家) family, who rose to prominence through success in military, commercial, and artistic endeavors in the 19th century. Most of these buildings have brick walls and tiled roofs in the traditional reddish-brown color, but in the middle is one incongruous property with bright white walls and a black tiled roof: Yipu Garden (頤圃). Purists may scoff at the Japanese-style exterior and its radical departure from the Fujianese architectural style of the surrounding buildings. However, the property
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