The first retrospective of work by Tracey Emin, the enfant terrible artist who has made a career out of intimate personal details including her own unmade bed, has opened to mixed reviews.
As well as My Bed, a mess of vodka bottles, cigarette butts and dirty underwear, Tracey Emin: 20 Years also features Conversations With My Mum, a video of her talking to her mother, and It’s Not the Way I Want to Die, a model of the roller coaster in her hometown of Margate.
The show, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, has attracted more than 13,000 visitors in the three weeks since it opened, but many critics have been scathing, accusing her of being unsubtle and self-important.
Most of the works focus on the artist’s own life — her teenage years, being raped at the age of 13, relationships and fears about never being a mother — with an unblinking intensity.
“Emin has turned her life into a public spectacle like no other artist before her,” wrote Patrick Elliott, the exhibition’s curator, in its catalogue.
Born in 1963, Emin is, alongside figures such as Damien Hirst, associated with the Young British Artists group that emerged in London in the 1990s.
Her eye-opening works have made her a household name and brought financial success — millionaire advertising guru Charles Saatchi, a major collector of contemporary British art, has repeatedly snapped up her pieces.
Emin has gradually become part of the art establishment — she became a member of the Royal Academy in 2007 and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale last year.
But she still draws stinging reviews from some critics.
“By the end of this show, I felt as if someone had been shouting at me down the phone for a couple of hours — a kind of emotional earache,” the Guardian newspaper’s reviewer wrote.
The Times was hardly more flattering — “What distresses me far more than Emin’s taste for the obscene ... is her amazing, unshakable faith in her own importance,” its reviewer said. Visitors to the Edinburgh show were divided in their reactions, meanwhile.
“Heavy, boring, rubbish” and “personal, thought-provoking, absorbing” were just two of the comments left in a visitors book.
The show runs in Edinburgh until Nov. 9 and travels to the Contemporary Art Center in Malaga, Spain from Nov. 28 to Feb. 22, 2009, and the Art Museum in Bern, Switzerland from March 10, 2009 to June 21, 2009.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
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 —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
RSS