This weekend, Huashan 1914 Creative Park plays hosts to a joint art exhibition “Voices 2025 x Photo ONE’25.”
The Taipei Times was invited on Wednesday to see the artists and exhibitors set up tables, art installations, hang picture frames and prepare for what organizers hope will be a popular event.
Occupying two distinct halves yet coming together in a shared space, the event showcases a wonderful mix of art, from photography to sculptures and interdisciplinary displays.
Photo: Lery Hiciano, Taipei Times
Photo ONE’25, on the right side of the event space, in buildings E2 A, B and C, is a showcase of eight individual galleries and dozens of artists, as well as tables of publishers selling photography books, magazines and even match boxes.
The artists represent not just Taiwan, but South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan as well, all bringing their unique perspectives for photography.
Themes and subject matter include food, tattooed gangsters and experimental depictions of relationships.
Photo: Lery Hiciano, Taipei Times
Shen Chao-liang (沈昭良), who serves as the event’s convener and led the pre-release gallery tour, has some of his most famous photographs on display from his series on Tokyo’s former Tsukiji Fish Market (築地魚市場).
ARTHIS Fine Art gallery displays a collection of black and white photographs from two Taiwanese photographers, Chih Huei-chang (張志輝) and the late Chang Chao-tang (張照堂).
Chih’s work leans toward landscapes, albeit moody, almost discomforting depictions of the natural world, while Chang’s photographs are surreal and open to the viewer’s interpretation.
Photo: Lery Hiciano, Taipei Times
One eye-catching exhibition is miniatures of stores, in all shapes and sizes, by Takahiko Suzuki.
Each store is represented as a recreation, an amalgamation of hundreds of digital images stitched together, alongside a large white poster of itself with the coordinates written across the sky.
A Web site then provides direction to the store from the viewers’ location.
Photo: Lery Hiciano, Taipei Times
Some of the stores are tiny stalls, others resemble churches, but the stereoscopic recreation perfectly straddles the line between authentic representations and works of art.
Each store is purposefully placed against a blue sky, a blank background, allowing for the viewer to visualize exactly where they would come across the store, what the owner looks like, how the food smells.
Japan’s Haruhiko Kawaguchi, part of the Gallery Tosei exhibit, set up his collection of photographs in which people interact with each other while wrapped in plastic, in contact but unable to bridge gaps between one another.
“Any questions?” he asked rhetorically with a smirk.
A family stands wrapped in plastic, much like a package, in front of their home and garden, also wrapped in plastic, two women kiss but are unable to interact with their environment; two people sit in a children’s playground, almost alien in how incongruous they are in contrast to their surroundings. His photographs speak for themselves, highlighting the barriers, often artificial, that separate us from our loved ones and our environments.
Moving away from the photography galleries, Tomoya Tsukamoto’s “Journey of Encounters” are the next stop.
Each individual piece is an expressive, larger than life, airbrushed canvas.
“This exhibition is an experiment in visualizing intersecting moments,” Tsukamoto said in an Instagram post promoting the event.
The kaleidoscope imagery of each work is made through airbrushing flowers and their petals, leaving behind white silhouettes against colorful backdrops.
While each individual work is visually interesting on its own, when taken together they create an effect to provide depth and meaning to the space.
Moving closer and standing further away both evoke different sensations in the viewer, a layered ethereal dynamic that speaks to the artist’s sense of space and detail.
Another non-photography collection of art is by Liu Hsin-ying (劉昕穎), presented by Taipei’s AKI Gallery.
Liu’s art is abstract, meant to resemble not just abstract landscapes but also represent specific moments, as seen in the bright red stalks in Straight to the Sky (直達天際) or the textures within Stars Scattered in the Dark Night Forest (星星灑落在黑夜的森林).
In addition to the exhibits, the galleries and artists will hold speaking sessions, award ceremonies and book signings throughout Saturday and Sunday afternoon.
William Liu (劉家君) moved to Kaohsiung from Nantou to live with his boyfriend Reg Hong (洪嘉佑). “In Nantou, people do not support gay rights at all and never even talk about it. Living here made me optimistic and made me realize how much I can express myself,” Liu tells the Taipei Times. Hong and his friend Cony Hsieh (謝昀希) are both active in several LGBT groups and organizations in Kaohsiung. They were among the people behind the city’s 16th Pride event in November last year, which gathered over 35,000 people. Along with others, they clearly see Kaohsiung as the nexus of LGBT rights.
Jan. 26 to Feb. 1 Nearly 90 years after it was last recorded, the Basay language was taught in a classroom for the first time in September last year. Over the following three months, students learned its sounds along with the customs and folktales of the Ketagalan people, who once spoke it across northern Taiwan. Although each Ketagalan settlement had its own language, Basay functioned as a common trade language. By the late 19th century, it had largely fallen out of daily use as speakers shifted to Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), surviving only in fragments remembered by the elderly. In
Dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s (艾未未) famous return to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been overshadowed by the astonishing news of the latest arrests of senior military figures for “corruption,” but it is an interesting piece of news in its own right, though more for what Ai does not understand than for what he does. Ai simply lacks the reflective understanding that the loneliness and isolation he imagines are “European” are simply the joys of life as an expat. That goes both ways: “I love Taiwan!” say many still wet-behind-the-ears expats here, not realizing what they love is being an
In the American west, “it is said, water flows upwards towards money,” wrote Marc Reisner in one of the most compelling books on public policy ever written, Cadillac Desert. As Americans failed to overcome the West’s water scarcity with hard work and private capital, the Federal government came to the rescue. As Reisner describes: “the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state.” In Taiwan, the money toward which water flows upwards is the high tech industry, particularly the chip powerhouse Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電). Typically articles on TSMC’s water demand
RSS