The 13th Taipei Biennial opened on Friday at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, with the curators expressing hope that it would reflect artists’ musings over social alienation and the essence of the arts during the height of COVID-19 lockdowns.
Featuring works by 58 local and international artists and musicians, the exhibition — curated by Freya Chou (周安曼), a Hong Kong-based Taiwanese independent curator, New York-based writer Brian Kuan Wood and Beirut Art Center director Reem Shadid — covers a wide range of art forms, including painting, photography, sound installation, installation art and short film.
A series of music-related events including live performances, guided listening sessions and forums began yesterday. The events are to run through March 17 in the Music Room on the museum’s basement level.
Photo courtesy of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum
The Psychedelic Spiritual Ceremony by Taichung-based artist Li Jiun-yang (李俊陽) blends ink paintings, fluorescent pigment paintings and live music performances.
The paintings were improvisations by himself and his artist friends during parties, Li said.
The works embodied their reflections and musings on some of life’s most profound questions: “What is love?” and “Should people get married?”
At the center of the room, a door leads to a smaller room where fluorescent pigment paintings glow on the wall.
The paintings depict seemingly random cartoon characters, mythical beasts and gourds — an auspicious symbol in Chinese-speaking communities that Li says represents his hope for world peace.
Your Tears Remind Me to Cry by Taipei-based artist Yang Chi-chuan (楊季涓) belies its soothing appearance and is actually a “microscopic examination” of fear, with the sculpture embodying the artist’s imagination of what fear would look like if it had a form, a description provided by Yang said.
Down the hall, seven large China vases command visitors’ attention. The vases, crafted in China’s Jiangxi Province by Berlin and Beirut-based artist Raed Yassin, have the appearance of a typical China vase, but they depict scenes from the Lebanese Civil War from 1975 to 1990.
The exhibition runs until March 24.
ALIGNED THINKING: Taiwan and Japan have a mutual interest in trade, culture and engineering, and can work together for stability, Cho Jung-tai said Taiwan and Japan are two like-minded countries willing to work together to form a “safety barrier” in the Indo-Pacific region, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) yesterday said at the opening ceremony of the 35th Taiwan-Japan Modern Engineering and Technology Symposium in Taipei. Taiwan and Japan are close geographically and closer emotionally, he added. Citing the overflowing of a barrier lake in the Mataian River (馬太鞍溪) in September, Cho said the submersible water level sensors given by Japan during the disaster helped Taiwan monitor the lake’s water levels more accurately. Japan also provided a lot of vaccines early in the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic,
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TEMPORAL/SPIRITUAL: Beijing’s claim that the next Buddhist leader must come from China is a heavy-handed political maneuver that will fall flat-faced, experts said China’s requirement that the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation to be born in China and approved by Beijing has drawn criticism, with experts at a forum in Taipei yesterday saying that if Beijing were to put forth its own Dalai Lama, the person would not be recognized by the Tibetan Buddhist community. The experts made a remarks at the two-day forum hosted by the Tibet Religious Foundation of His Holiness the Dalai Lama titled: “The Snow Land Forum: Finding Common Ground on Tibet.” China says it has the right to determine the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation, as it claims sovereignty over Tibet since ancient times,
Temperatures in some parts of Taiwan are expected to fall sharply to lows of 15°C later this week as seasonal northeasterly winds strengthen, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said today. It is to be the strongest cold wave to affect northern Taiwan this autumn, while Chiayi County in the southwest and some parts of central Taiwan are likely to also see lower temperatures due to radiational cooling, which occurs under conditions of clear skies, light winds and dry weather, the CWA said. Across Taiwan, temperatures are to fall gradually this week, dropping to 15°C to 16°C in the early hours of Wednesday
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