In the violently graphic The Fabled Shoots (槍下非亡魂 ─ 蘇匯宇個展), video artist Su Hui-yu (蘇匯宇) is both the perp and the victim. A satire on brutality, the installation uses MTV-style techniques to poke fun at the global obsession with terrorism and shows how movies and television desensitize us to violence.
Su’s piece is one of five short-listed finalists for The 6th Taishin Arts Awards (第六屆台新藝術獎), an annual jury prize awarded to local artists, on display at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA, Taipei, 台北當代藝術館). Aside from the NT$1 million cash prize, winners enjoy considerable international recognition for their work.
Tsui Kuang-yu’s (崔廣宇) The Shortcut to the Systematic Life — Invisible City (系統生活捷徑 — 城市瞎摸), is a series of video snippets of urban life. In one video, Tsui turns non-pedestrian areas of Liverpool into Chinese-style reflexology footpaths, while in Amsterdam he wears an outfit that spurts out water — a reference to the floods that affected Europe last year.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MOCA, TAIPEI
Kuo I-chen’s (郭奕臣) Mutation (突變) combines urban landscapes and lunar phenomena in a photographic pastiche that disorients viewers.
Images of natural and man-made disasters seamlessly merge together in a photograph, which demonstrates humanity’s frailty.
In the Name of Art (以藝術之名) by Public Television Service (公共電視) is an eight-episode documentary that examines Taiwan’s contemporary art over the past century. It’s not “art” per se, but the series introduces some of Taiwan’s best-known artists and their work. MOCA fitted a small room with four flat-screen televisions to air the documentary in its entirety.
Visitors can wander through a hanging garden of oyster shells before taking in the community-oriented mural The Sea of Hope: Oyster and Seashell Mural With Community Participants (台西─希望之海參與式蚵貝壁畫).
Hsu Hsiu-yun (�?�), the exhibition’s curator, organized a group of artists and other people who derive their livelihoods from the ocean to create a public art project that draws attention to the poverty of Taisi Township (台西), Yunlin County.
Using seashells gathered from Taisi’s beaches, the colossal mural draws attention to how mechanization is destroying the local fishing industry and traditional way of life.
The Taishin Awards also have a performing arts section, and one large room on MOCA’s second floor showcases 10 installations that introduce individual performing art groups, memorabilia from featured productions such as the witch masks from Tainaner Ensembles’ Shakespeare Unplugged 3 – Macbeth, and footage of performances and interviews.
Feces, vomit and fossilized food from inside stomachs have provided new clues into how dinosaurs rose to dominate Earth, a new study revealed on Wednesday. Scientists have discovered plenty about dinosaurs — particularly about how they vanished off the face of the planet 66 millions years ago. But “we know very little about their rise,” said Martin Qvarnstrom, a researcher at Sweden’s Uppsala University and the study’s lead author. Dinosaurs first appeared at least 230 million years ago, fossils have shown. But they would not become the world’s dominant animal until the start of the Jurassic Period some 30 million years later. What caused this
Last week, the government rejected a petition to amend the law that would allow permanent residents a path to citizenship. This was widely expected, but it came amid a flurry of negative trends about the future of the nation’s labor force. There was much ironic commentary on the juxtaposition of that decision with its idiotic, abusive reasoning with the urgent demand for labor across a wide range of fields. This demand was highlighted by the government’s plans for five NT$10 billion (US$307.6 million) funds to promote development in key fields, including artificial intelligence (AI), “smart” healthcare and green growth announced
The Mountains to Sea National Greenway (山海圳國家綠道) draws its name from the idea that each hiker starting at the summit of Jade Mountain (玉山) and following the trail to the coast is like a single raindrop. Together, many raindrops form life and prosperity-bringing waterways. Replicating a raindrop’s journey holds poetic beauty, but all hikers know that climbing is infinitely more appealing, and so this installment picks up where the last one left off — heading inland and uphill along the 49.8-kilometer Canal Trail (大圳之路) — second of the Greenway’s four sections. A detailed map of the trail can be found
“Bro, I can’t wait for my first dead body,” wrote an 11-year-old boy on Instagram in Sweden, where gangs recruit children too young to be prosecuted as contract killers on chat apps. “Stay motivated, it’ll come,” answered his 19-year-old contact. He went on to offer the child 150,000 kronor (US$13,680) to carry out a murder, as well as clothes and transport to the scene of the crime, according to a police investigation of the exchange last year in the western province of Varmland. In this case, four men aged 18 to 20 are accused of recruiting four minors aged 11 to 17
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