Ku Shih-yung (顧世勇) isn’t known for making accessible art. His 2006 solo exhibition at Taipei’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) included video, bubbles, bells, wax, trumpets and even a life-size dummy attached to a balloon floating above the museum that reportedly prompted a call to police about a possible suicide attempt. The former dean of the College of Visual Arts at Tainan National University of the Arts has penned dense essays on art and theory that reference aspirin-conducive writers like French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
Given Ku’s reputation, Oh! Formosa (美哉台灣) at IT Park Gallery (伊通公園) appears deceptively simple. The 49-year-old presents nine large digitally retouched photographs and two smaller unaltered pictures collected from old political magazines and flea markets. The images romanticize “the good-old days” when the sun always shone and beach babes frolicked in the sand.
The average Taiwanese no longer believes the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) promise of “a brighter tomorrow” and has lost hope in the sullied idealism the Democratic Progressive Party once expounded, Ku says. Many prefer to dwell in a utopian past that may never have existed outside their imagination.
LIVING THE DREAM
Nothing too complicated about that. So is the show a sea change for Ku? Yes and no, he says.
“In the past my art didn’t pay much attention to its place within Taiwan’s context, but now I’m thinking more about it: political, economic and social problems. [I’m examining] the Taiwanese dream from 1949 until now, and I include a little criticism: If we’re going to really face reality, we have to first abandon this dream.”
Ku laughs when I tell him that even my Taiwanese friends find his writing and some of his art hard to understand. He admits his new works are less “artsy,” but says his concept has changed very little. Themes of “peace” and “utopia” in Oh! Formosa can be found in earlier works such as Bubble Man (2006) that hung above MOCA and its antecedent, a 1999-2000 video in which the artist blows a giant bubble that carries him into space, only to burst and send him hurtling back to the earth in a ball of flame.
BREAKING THE MOLD
Ku also stresses a cornerstone of his work that hasn’t changed in 27 years.
After following the conservative curriculum at National Taiwan University of Arts in Banciao, Taipei County, his graduate exhibition consisted simply of photographs of him sitting in a chair, viewed from behind, with nondescript views such as a window or wall in front of him. He called the series Where Do I Sit? and the works showed no reference to the formal techniques he had studied.
“My ‘hand’ in the works I make isn’t important,” he says. “The expression is.”
His statement echoes basic conceptualist dogma that for decades has pitted “idea” art against “formal” art and continues to generate heated intellectual discussion.
Ku’s current show seems an effort by an insider to bring this discussion out of the highfalutin art circle and into the mouths and minds of everyday people. If so, his biggest challenge will be the same that many contemporary artists face: convincing the general public to drop by the gallery and give it a gander.
For those hesitant to make the trip to IT Park for a relatively small show, there are two nearby galleries also worth checking out: VT Art Salon is next door and 50m down the road is the newly opened Sakshi Gallery Taipei — a branch of its Mumbai, India-based namesake — that opens its second show of Indian art on Saturday.
While global attention is finally being focused on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) gray zone aggression against Philippine territory in the South China Sea, at the other end of the PRC’s infamous 9 dash line map, PRC vessels are conducting an identical campaign against Indonesia, most importantly in the Natuna Islands. The Natunas fall into a gray area: do the dashes at the end of the PRC “cow’s tongue” map include the islands? It’s not clear. Less well known is that they also fall into another gray area. Indonesia’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claim and continental shelf claim are not
Since their leader Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and others were jailed as part of several ongoing bribery investigations, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has risen in the polls. Additionally, despite all the many and varied allegations against Ko and most of the top people in the party, it has held together with only a tiny number of minor figures exiting. The TPP has taken some damage, but vastly less than the New Power Party (NPP) did after it was caught up in a bribery scandal in 2020. The TPP has for years registered favorability in the thirties, and a Formosa poll
Nov. 4 to Nov. 10 Apollo magazine (文星) vowed that it wouldn’t play by the rules in its first issue — a bold statement to make in 1957, when anyone could be jailed for saying the wrong thing. However, the introduction to the inaugural Nov. 5 issue also defined the magazine as a “lifestyle, literature and art” publication, and the contents were relatively tame for the first four years, writes Tao Heng-sheng (陶恒生) in “The Apollo magazine that wouldn’t play by the rules” (不按牌理出牌的文星雜誌). In 1961, the magazine changed its mission to “thought, lifestyle and art” and adopted a more critical tone with
“Designed to be deleted” is the tagline of one of the UK’s most popular dating apps. Hinge promises that it is “the dating app for people who want to get off dating apps” — the place to find lasting love. But critics say modern dating is in crisis. They claim that dating apps, which have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times worldwide, are “exploitative” and are designed not to be deleted but to be addictive, to retain users in order to create revenue. An Observer investigation has found that dating apps are increasingly pushing users to buy extras that have been
RSS