Ju Ming (朱銘) returns to Kalos Gallery with Citizen (市民), a series of 80 human-scale wood sculptures that form part of the Living World Series (人間木雕系列), a long-term art project begun in 1981 that has as its focus the people and society of Taiwan. The exhibition portrays ordinary city dwellers from all walks of life. The unpainted and rough-textured sculptures express the diversity of humanity and, in their majestic grandeur, suggest the extraordinary aspects of ordinary people in everyday life.
■ Kalos Gallery (真善美畫廊), 269, Dunhua S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市敦化南路一段269號). Open daily from 10am to 6:30pm, closed Sundays. Tel: (02) 2836-3452
■ Until Feb. 8
Orientations (方向) showcases new and old paintings by Jorinde Jankowski (張友鷦), whose canvases vary in subject matter and style. In her vaguely monochromatic cityscapes, she depicts the isolation and fragmentation of urban life, delineating an all too common alienation as a symbol for human longing. In other paintings, she employs a vibrant palette of color and cartoon-like, personified animal figures to mock human flaws, while in other canvases she becomes more introspective and investigates the meaning of home, family and belonging with fairytale-like images that possess dark undertones.
■ Art Den (藝研齋), 3F, 309, Xinyi Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市信義路四段309號3樓), tel: (02) 2325-8188. Open Mondays to Fridays from 11am to 5pm, and Saturdays from 10am to 6pm
■ Until Jan. 19
Contemporary Chinese artist, Shi Jinsong (史金淞), works in sculpture, painting, and on-site experiential performance, and uses non-traditional easel-painting forms to express his concern for the transitory nature of life and its objects. With Scenes from an Unpredictable Theatre, Shi uses theatrical elements as the artistic medium for his new exhibition, which is in two parts. The first involved Shi traveling throughout Taiwan over the past few months, collecting everyday objects and returning them to the gallery, where an invited audience was encouraged to smash them using a variety of hammers. The artist will, over the coming weeks, use the detritus — what he dubs “a script” — to form an installation, which he calls “a play,” which will be on view in the gallery until May.
■ MOT Arts, 3F, 22, Fuxing S Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市復興南路一段22號3樓), tel: (02) 2751-8088. Open daily from 11:30am to 8pm
■ Until May 26
Experimental sound installations and live performances make up a solo exhibition by Chang Yung-ta (感知‧交界). Entitled Seen/Unseen (張永達), Chang transforms invisible signals and data — radiation from a nuclear power plant, for example — into sound waves, which serve as the primary objects of his installations. The two pieces present the conversion of visible things to invisible sounds, or the conversion of something visual into something auditory, which is meant to convey a looming yet silent message.
■ Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (關渡美術館), Taipei National University of the Arts (台北藝術大學), 1 Xueyuan Rd, Taipei City (台北市學園路1號). Open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10am to 5pm. Tel: (02) 2896-1000 X2432
■ Until Feb. 24
Huang Pei-ju (黃珮如) continues her exploration of light and darkness as a metaphor of liminality with Reduced to Light (躲進光裡面). Huang uses pen to create various wash effects on the canvas, which are meant to suggest a visible contour to light.
■ IT Park Gallery (伊通公園), 2F-3F, 41 Yitong St, Taipei City (台北市伊通街41號2-3樓). Open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 1pm to 10pm. Tel: (02) 2507-7243
■ Until Jan. 26
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and