A pig’s head sits atop a shelf, tufts of blonde hair sprouting from its taut scalp. Opposite, its chalky, wrinkled heart glows red in a bubbling vat of liquid, locks of thick dark hair and teeth scattered below. A giant screen shows the pig draped in a hospital gown. Is it dead? A surgeon inserts human teeth implants, then hair implants — beautifying the horrifyingly human-like animal.
Chang Chen-shen (張辰申) calls Incarnation Project: Deviation Lovers “a satirical self-criticism, a critique on the fact that throughout our lives we’ve been instilled with ideas and things that don’t belong to us.”
Chang is among 10 finalists in last year’s Taipei Art Awards whose work is currently on display at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum until March 2. It is decisively contemporary — exhibits are written, filmed, even rapped, offering alternative mediums and compelling storytelling.
Photo: Hollie Younger, TT
Each artist is given a room of their own, offering up parallel universes from the violent and uncomfortable to the nostalgic and emotive to the futuristic and sci-fi.
The largest and impactful exhibit is Father’s Vital Collection: Heaven and Earth Are My Buildings, And Houses My Clothes, How Come Y’all Step Into My Trousers? by Sim Chang (張哲榕), its contents as delightfully complex as its title.
The space recreates his father’s second-hand book store, with piling yellowed pages and photographs of his father roaming the streets of Taipei collecting pots, pans and all manner of junk.
Photo: Hollie Younger, TT
Interspersed with the fading books and photographs, Sim Chang lays bare the soaring highs and crashing lows of his bipolar disorder, which he was diagnosed with while working on this project. Combined, the visitor is immersed in the world created by two minds — one that is at times manic, the other exhibiting the compulsion to hoard.
Sim Chang says his condition has “gifted [him] with something special,” because it enables him to understand and sympathize with his father. It also bestowed him with natural rhyming abilities — abilities that combine in a featured video of him rapping in a frenzy, while sitting on his father’s “vital collection.”
Poyuan Juan’s (阮柏遠) Yes, I’m a simp. Simply in love with... elicits concerns for the incoming age of AI and lives lived digitally. We are warned before entering: “only suitable for over-18s due to scenes of a sexual nature.”
Photo: Hollie Younger, TT
Yet it’s not so much explicit as it is strange.
“An automatic vomit,” an AI sex doll says non-sensically on a glitchy, anime-inspired multiscreen display. The room glows neon green and shades of violet, robotic voices echoing through the exhibit’s clean negative spaces.
Juan’s work explores online romantic relationships experienced through “the emotional linkage of the spirit and the sensory perception of physical contact.”
Photo: Hollie Younger, TT
Another screen projects a live video stream, as a wide-eyed, nearly-naked cartoon girl receives thousands of messages from “simps,” a Gen-Z insult for those who obsess over a romantic interest, lusting over a sexualized protagonist while hunched over computer screens.
Oversized iPhone screens flick mindlessly through Instagram reels; the exhibit explores “the overlapping of digital and real spaces, much like being trapped in a social media browsing loop,” Juan says.
The work of the young artists exhibited this year is interconnected in its feeling — futuristic, yet worryingly of the now.
Photo: Hollie Younger, TT
As mega K-pop group BTS returns to the stage after a hiatus of more than three years, one major market is conspicuously missing from its 12-month world tour: China. The omission of one of the group’s biggest fan bases comes as no surprise. In fact, just the opposite would have been huge news. China has blocked most South Korean entertainment since 2016 under an unofficial ban that also restricts movies and the country’s popular TV dramas. For some Chinese, that means flying to Seoul to see their favorite groups perform — as many were expected to do for three shows opening
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
Apr. 13 to Apr. 19 From 17th-century royalty and Presbyterian missionaries to White Terror victims, cultural figures and industrialists, Nanshan Public Cemetery (南山公墓) sprawls across 95 hectares, guarding four centuries of Taiwan’s history. Current estimates show more than 60,000 graves, the earliest dating to 1642. Besides individual tombs, there are also hundreds of family plots, one of which is said to contain around 1,000 remains. As the cemetery occupies valuable land in the heart of Tainan, the government in 2018 began asking families to relocate the graves to make way for development. That
RSS