Passing Scenes: New Landscape Painting From Four Viewpoints (掠影 — 新風景四人展) presents 50 Western-style landscape paintings informed by an Asian sensibility from four contemporary artists: Shiau Bei-chen (蕭北辰), Ke Wei-kuo (柯偉國), Lin Chi-yu (林芝宇) and Cheng An-chi (鄭安齊).
■ Cathay United Art Center (國泰世華藝術中心), 7F, 236 Dunhua N Rd, Taipei City (台北市敦化北路236號7樓). Open Mondays to Saturdays from 10am to 6pm. Tel: (02) 2717-0988
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 3pm. Until Oct. 30
Teerawat Mulvilai’s first residency project four years ago at Taipei Artist Village explored the lives of Thai migrant workers living in Taiwan. With Tropical Plant, his current project, the Thai performance artist and documentary filmmaker seeks out the subjects he interviewed four years ago to see how they have managed to retain their own identities while making a life for themselves in Taiwan.
■ Grass Mountain Artist Village (草山國際藝術村), 92 Hudi Rd, Taipei City (台北市湖底路92號).
Open Wednesdays to Sundays from 10am to 4pm. Tel: (02) 2862-2404
■ Opening reception on Saturday at 11am. Until Oct. 24
Ten emerging Taiwanese artists offer different perspectives of life in the city through painting, photography and installation in Crowded Paradise (擁擠的樂園).
■ Shin Leh Yuan (SLY) Art Space (新樂園藝術空間), 15-2, Ln 11, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 2, Taipei (台北市中山北路二段11巷15-2號). Open Wednesdays to Sundays from 1pm to 8pm. Tel: (02) 2561-1548
■ Reception on Saturday at 5pm. Until Oct. 17
Watch Time Watching (看時間看) is a solo exhibit by Kao Chung-li (高重黎). Kao employs different techniques derived from film and animation to explore the nature of the moving image and its influence on our perceptions of time.
■ Tina Keng Gallery (大未來耿畫廊), 1F, 15, Ln 548, Ruiguang Rd, Taipei City (台北市瑞光路548巷15號一樓). Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 7pm.
Tel: (02) 2659-0798
■ Until Sept. 26
After several years of silence, installation artist Shy Gong (施工忠昊) returns with Taike Fantasy (台客幻想曲). The work consists of nine two-dimensional images and uses a “comical and satirical approach to portray the bitter-sweetness in Taiwanese society,” aspects that are meant to exemplify taike (台客), a once pejorative term now employed to celebrate Taiwanese culture. The reality, however, is that these “digital paintings,” with their geometrical structures resembling microscopic organisms, adds little to our understanding of the genre, the “Taike” in the title seemingly little more than a sobriquet to attract people to the exhibit.
■ Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA, Taipei), 39 Changan W Rd, Taipei City (台北市長安西路39號). Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm. Tel: (02) 2552-3720. General admission is NT$50
■ Until Oct. 31
Her Story — Photographic Works From the Museum’s Collection (她們的故事 — 館藏女性圖象攝影展) examines the “progress of a woman’s life cycle,” in an exhibit that attempts to capture the “collective memory of countless ordinary women.” According to the National Museum of History’s press blurb, this includes women “in many different roles: working women, mothers, models, etc.” Let’s hope the “etc” means more than simple patriarchal assumptions about the role women should play in society.
■ National Museum of History (國立歷史博物館),
49 Nanhai Rd, Taipei City (台北市南海路49號).
Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 6pm.
Tel: (02) 2361-0270. General admission is NT$30
■ Until Oct. 24
With subject headings such as “Straight Talk,” “Don’t mention politics, religion or sex!” and “Subversive Arguments,” the Yingge Ceramics Biennial seems intent on contemporizing this often-staid medium. The biennial, entitled Korero — a Maori term that suggests an exchange of information or dialogue — brings together 43 artists from 17 countries and offers an interesting look at different approaches to ceramics, including contemporary manifestations along with more traditional forms.
■ Yingge Ceramics Museum (鶯歌陶瓷博物館), 200 Wenhua Rd, Yinge Township, Taipei County (台北縣鶯歌鎮文化路200號). Open daily from 9:30am to 5pm, closes at 6pm on Saturdays and Sundays.
Tel: (02) 8677-2727. General admission is NT$99
■ Until Oct. 31
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
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