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Taipei Lowdown: 8 Must-See Exhibitions, Spring 2024

By Ocula Editors  |  Taipei, 8 May 2024

Taipei Lowdown: 8 Must-See Exhibitions, Spring 2024

Exhibition view: Wang Huaiqing, The Art of Play, Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei (16 March–18 May 2024). Courtesy Tina Keng Gallery. Photo: ANPIS FOTO.

As Taipei Dangdai returns to Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center this weekend, Ocula contributors Zian Chen, Anna Dickie, Elaine Zheng, and Shanyu Zhong, round up their top picks of exhibitions to see across the city. Recommendations include a survey of William Kentridge's extraordinary four-decade career at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, a solo show by Wang Huaiqing at Tina Keng Gallery, and the 2024 Taiwan International Documentary Festival.

Exhibition view: William Kentridge, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (4 May–1 September 2024). © William Kentridge.

Exhibition view: William Kentridge, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (4 May–1 September 2024). © William Kentridge. Courtesy TFAM.

William Kentridge
Taipei Fine Arts Museum, No.181, Section 3, Zhongshan N Road
4 May–1 September 2024

Expect: a comprehensive survey of the legendary artist's creative trajectory spanning more than four decades.

A collaboration between Taipei Fine Arts Museum and London's Royal Academy of Arts, this show is a testament to the South African artist's standing as one of the most important cultural figures of our time. First shown at the Royal Academy in 2022, it spans the artist's extraordinary output—from his scratchy charcoal drawings and etchings to stop-motion short films and sublime stage performances. The result is a slam dunk of simple gestures that traverse complex subjects with sophisticated assurance.

Born in 1955, Kentridge often references the horrors of apartheid in his work while also celebrating humanity's resilience. In addition to drawings of the fictional industrialist Soho Eckstein, who lives off the toil of impoverished Johannesburg citizens, there are images of brutalised labourers, queues of starving citizens, secret police, and snarling animals—including hyenas, warthogs, and cheetahs—who represent corrupt government officials. Yet, there is also a room dedicated to enormous roses and lilacs, drawn in charcoal on sheets of newspaper in an outsize homage to Édouard Manet; large ink drawings of trees over which are pasted snippets of poems from the artist's notebooks; and an exquisite ballerina, who dances across the three-channel HD film installation Notes Towards a Model Opera (2015), albeit with a gun in hand.

Charcoal is at the epicentre of Kentridge's expansive oeuvre, used to create drawings, etchings, linocuts, animations, shadow plays, operas, ballets, tapestries, and mechanical puppet shows, often by way of a process that involves the drawing, erasing, re-drawing, and adjusting of a single image. The overall effect is a cohesive vision of trembling figures and a cacophony of storytelling, which not only calls humanity to account but expresses the artist's deep love of music, cinema, literature, and, perhaps most importantly, imagination.

Anna Dickie

Exhibition view: Wang Huaiqing, The Art of Play, Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei (16 March–18 May 2024).

Exhibition view: Wang Huaiqing, The Art of Play, Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei (16 March–18 May 2024). Courtesy Tina Keng Gallery. Photo: ANPIS FOTO.

Wang Huaiqing: The Art of Play
Tina Keng Gallery, 1F, No.15, Lane 548, Ruiguang Road
16 March–18 May 2024

Expect: works by an exemplary modernist and innovator, who prioritised the simplicity of everyday forms whilst preserving tradition.

Born in Beijing, Wang Huaiqing came to painting during the Cultural Revolution when he met his mentor, Wu Guanzhong—one of the founders of modern Chinese painting—at a labour reform camp. In line with the socialist realist style of the time, Wang started out as a figurative painter but refused to depict political leaders or their causes. In 1980, he co-founded the Contemporaries, an artist group with a shared interest in extinguishing 'the ugly, the absurd, or the deceptive, and preserv[ing] on canvas the beautiful, the warm, and the candid'.

Employing the calligraphic lines of traditional ink painting, Wang conceived a distinctive style that combined cubist and minimalist influences with references to antique Chinese furniture and architecture in works that speak to the Communist-led destruction of his country, including its arts and literature while honouring its cultural developments over the millennia.

These affective resonances can be felt in The Art of Play, the artist's first solo show at Tina Keng Gallery since 2014. Running concurrently with his retrospective at the Asia University Museum of Modern Art in Taichung, the exhibition includes a selection of oil paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, providing a comprehensive overview of the artist's oeuvre from the last 50 years.

Elaine YJ Zheng

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe.

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe. Courtesy TKG+.

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe: The Idiot's Manual
TKG+, B1, No. 15, Ln. 548, Ruiguang Road
8 May–3 August 2024

Expect: a conceptual pivot in Yawnghwe's practice to acknowledge the impending apocalypse.

A descendant of the Shan royal family, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe has devoted much of his artistic career to investigating the political history of Myanmar, where the 1962 military coup led ultimately to his family's exile, first to Thailand, then to Canada, where he was raised.

Using abstraction as a strategy, Yawnghwe's earlier paintings attempted to make sense of Myanmar's military repression, political unrest, and mistreatment of ethnic minorities, drawing from current events, family archives, and the nation's history, with an emphasis on the Shan minority to which he belongs.

However, the artist's latest solo show at TKG+, The Idiot's Manual, marks a shift in focus from personal and familial narratives to the crises currently confronting humanity in a series of new paintings informed by global warming, the pandemic and the threat of artificial intelligence.

The large-scale, cartographic painting Post-Apocalypse Parallax (2024), for instance, maps relations between capitalism, labour, and social engagement within a pyramid grid, drawing on philosopher Slavoj Žižek's notion from The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), that ideology is omnipresent and distorts our perception of reality.

In a further series of abstract works, such as Most Ominously (2023), Yawnghwe takes sentences from his father's notebooks and incorporates them within colour-drenched, acrylic-on-linen compositions. His father's assertions lose their potency amid these dynamic visual configurations, with the artist seemingly advocating the futility of language—and, in particular, of pathos-laden rhetoric—in the face of stark reality.

Elaine YJ Zheng

A Bench of the Grand Hall, Taipei Municipal Zhongshan Girls High School (1972) designed by Hsiu Tes-Nan. Wooden andiron. 425 x 40 x 81 cm.

A Bench of the Grand Hall, Taipei Municipal Zhongshan Girls High School (1972) designed by Hsiu Tes-Nan. Wooden andiron. 425 x 40 x 81 cm. Courtesy Taipei Municipal Zhongshan Girls High School. Image © Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Modern Life: Taiwan Architecture 1949–1983
Taipei Fine Arts Museum, No.181, Section 3, Zhongshan N Road
23 March–30 June 2024

Expect: a journey through Taiwan's post-war modernisation as documented by the evolution of local architecture.

Modern Life: Taiwan Architecture traces the island's shifting cultural landscape following the regime change of 1949, when China's Nationalist government relocated to Taiwan, bringing with it new architectural styles along with an alternative way of life.

Divided into six sections, the exhibition—conceived in collaboration with architecture scholars Wu Kwang-Tyng, Wang Chun-Hsiung, and Wang Tseng-Yung—unpacks the diverse influences that marked this post-war era leading to Taiwan's eventual modernisation, where Japanese, Western, and Taiwanese styles converged within the built environment.

Bringing together more than 200 architectural drawings, models, archives, images, and videos—alongside several replicas of models and designer furniture specially crafted for this exhibition—Modern Life: Taiwan Architecture traces an evolution that spans China's return to tradition, the American influences that accompanied foreign aid, and the provision of social housing in the 1950s.

Elaine YJ Zheng

Taipei Lowdown: 8 Must-See Exhibitions, Spring 2024 Image 188

Courtesy Taiwan International Documentary Festival.

2024 Taiwan International Documentary Festival
Different Venues
10–18 May 2024

Expect: some 140 documentaries by local and international filmmakers alongside talks, lectures, performances, and exhibitions.

Co-organised by Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute and Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, the 14th Taiwan International Documentary Festival includes more than 200 screenings by 100 filmmakers at various venues across Taipei and New Taipei City.

The festival celebrates several works by leading contemporary artists, including Chen Chieh-jen's Worn Away (2023), which premiered last year at his solo exhibition at Secession in Vienna, and Hsu Chia-wei's A Performance in the Church (2024), both of which feature in the section 'Taiwan Competition'. So Yo-hen's Taman-taman (Park) (2024) is part of the 'Asian Vision Competition', while works by Singaporean artist Ho Rui An and the Netherlands-based Chinese artist Bo Wang are showcased in 'Appropriate Appropriation: Archive and More'.

Further highlights include the 'Cinema Protects Memories' programme, screening films from Hong Kong and China, and 'Metaphors of the Times: The Reality Named Myanmar', which celebrates the country's artistic resilience despite escalating political tensions.

Conceived in an inaugural partnership with the Ukraine-based human rights film festival Docudays UA, the 'Exchange|Decade in Blue and Yellow: Ukrainian Documentaries' programme traces a decade of war in Ukraine through cinematic perspectives.

Zian Chen

Dimension Plus, VS AI Street Fighting (2023). Mixed media. Dimensions variable. Exhibition view: Hello, Human!, MOCA Taipei (27 January–12 May 2024).

Dimension Plus, VS AI Street Fighting (2023). Mixed media. Dimensions variable. Exhibition view: Hello, Human!, MOCA Taipei (27 January–12 May 2024). Courtesy MOCA Taipei. Photo: ANPIS FOTO王世邦.

Hello, Human!
MOCA Taipei, No. 39, Chang'an W Road
27 January–12 May 2024

Expect: new-media works that present a broad inquiry into AI innovation by artists with backgrounds in information technology.

Starting from the radical assertion that humans living in the 21st century are 'deprived of the option of not choosing AI', Hello, Human! contends with the autonomous technologies that may, as co-curator Keith Lam speculates, someday render humanity 'irrelevant'.

Exaggerating technology's detrimental implications for dramatic effect, Lam's introduction personifies artificial intelligence as a self-evolving entity—a black box whose internal operations cannot be known and, as such, remain beyond our control, leading to an inevitable apocalypse.

The works on view—by 16 artists, including Daito Manabe, Anna Ridler, and Winnie Soon—feel more grounded, however. Manabe's installation AIINA (2024), for instance, an AI-generated inquiry into the impact of technology on Hollywood and the entertainment industry, contemplates a different role for humans in the future.

Elaine YJ Zheng

Exhibition view: Musquiqui Chihying, Ghost in the Sea, Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, Taipei (30 March–12 May 2024). Photo: Sean Wang/ The Hong Foundation.

Exhibition view: Musquiqui Chihying, Ghost in the Sea, Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, Taipei (30 March–12 May 2024). Photo: Sean Wang/ The Hong Foundation.

Musquiqui Chihying: Ghost in the Sea
Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, No. 177, Section 1, Jianguo S Road
30 March–12 May 2024

Expect: an immersive experience featuring seven new video installations that platform the artist's ongoing investigations into racial capitalism.

Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, a powerhouse of contemporary art production, is currently presenting a solo exhibition by Musquiqui Chihying that unpacks the artist's extensive research into Chinese overseas expansion in Africa. Chihying eloquently conveys the complexities of global capital and racial politics through seven brand-new works in a range of installation formats emblematic of his visual language.

The show, titled Ghost in the Sea, delves into the historical significance of shipping routes to Mauritius. Once pivotal in transporting Asian 'coolies' following the abolition of the slave trade, these same routes are now followed by contemporary submarine cables, which currently handle 90 per cent of global data traffic along the Afrasian Sea.

At the exhibition's core is the mesmerising video installation The Link (2024), featuring three hexagonal screens arranged within a mandala. Shot at the Nam Shun Society Building in Port Louis, Mauritius, the 30-minute narrative blends sci-fi imagery with elements of Hakka opera. By delving into the history of mid-19th-century Chinese-Hakka indentured labourers and traders, the film evokes a parallel narrative that mirrors the journey of Hakka settlers in Taiwan.

Zian Chen

Taipei Lowdown: 8 Must-See Exhibitions, Spring 2024 Image 313

Courtesy Hong-Gah Museum.

There Is Another Capital Beneath the Waves
Hong-Gah Museum, 11F, No. 166 Daye Road, Beitou District
4 May–30 June 2024

Expect: a multi-media exploration of Taiwan's colonial history that delves into themes of manipulation and the legacy of modernisation.

Tracing Taiwan's colonial period under Japanese rule in the early 20th century from the perspectives of both coloniser and colonised, this exhibition features two video installations that stem from an ongoing research project launched in 2020 by artists Chia-Wei Hsu, Ting-Tong Chang, and Hsien-Yu Cheng.

Crystal Seeding (2021) unpacks the early-20th-century prosperity of Huwei—a result of the construction of sugar mills to supply the Japanese market—and other complex memories of war and modernisation. There Is Another Capital Beneath the Waves (2023) focuses on the Japanese town of Moji, once a flourishing hub for international trade and home to the Dai-Nippon Seito sugar factory. The work intertwines this historical narrative with elements borrowed from The Tale of the Heike, a 14th-century epic that includes the tragic story of Empress Taira no Tokiko, who threw herself into the sea during battle, holding her infant grandson, Emperor Antoku, in her arms and consoling him with the words, 'There is another capital beneath the waves.'

Along with CGI animation and music, the installations employ traditional Taiwanese glove puppetry and Japanese joruri puppetry—with a programme of live performances by puppeteers from both nations—to symbolise and reflect upon the forces that underpin the relationship between manipulator and manipulated.

The exhibition recently opened at Hong-Gah Museum following its debut last year at the Yamaguchi Media Arts Centre in Japan.

Shanyu Zhong —[O]

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