American author Ernest Hemingway once wrote: “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.” Though not large, Taiwan ranges across more than 3,000 meters of elevation. Its peaks and valleys, coastlines and villages, and lovely days in every season offer stunning views of its varied landscapes.
Humpback Whale House opened its doors in Taichung with a flurry in December 2017, dedicating itself to promoting original Taiwanese artwork via diverse forms of creative expression, such as painting, music or installation art. From that day onward, the house has joined the Gaomei Wetlands as a new attraction in Qingshui District, a coastal suburb of Taichung.
Kaohsiung’s Kezailiao fishing village, which at first glance looks no different from many communities along the western seacoast of Taiwan, seemed to come out of nowhere in 2012 when it hosted the independent music festival “Small Oyster Rock.” The festival became an overnight sensation, attracting upward of 10,000 visitors, and even President Tsai Ing-wen and Kaohsiung mayor Chen Chu took time out to attend.
Chen Cheng-hsiung is the only Asian artist to have been conferred both a Lifetime Achievement in Art Award and a Lorenzo il Magnifico Award in two different years at the Florence Biennale. In 1999 he received both awards for his “Window” series, and in 2001 he was honored again for his “Digital Space” series.
In 2014, when Tsai Po-cheng’s Floating Flowers won the Audience Award and the Gauthier Dance/Stuttgart Theater Production Award at the International Competition for Choreographers Hanover, he became the only dancer to have come away with both big prizes at the event. In 2015 Tsai’s newly created work Hugin/Munin won the Burgos & New York International Choreography Competition and the Tanz Luzerner Theater Production Award at the Copenhagen International Choreography Competition. Then in 2017
Years ago artistic inspiration prompted both Lo Fang-yun and Chen Cheng-ting to travel more than 8000 kilometers from Taiwan to Germany. Having studied and worked there, they have combined their Taiwanese roots and German training in a new dance production called Unsolved, which explores profound questions of identity that were sharpened by their experiences abroad. The production is the result of years of creative experience and represents the artists’ journey of self-inquiry. It is also an ir
What happens when George Orwell’s novel 1984, a work of political allegory and satire, meets the play Three Sisters by Russian realist writer Anton Chekhov? At the end of 2017, Taiwan’s Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group and Japan’s Dainanagekijo theater company endeavored to find the answer to that question when they staged their Note Exchange Vol. 2: 1984.
“Silverfish eat books,” explains Wu Jer-ruey. “If you’ve got enough books, they will come and gorge on them. Once that happens you are no longer your own master. You become the servant of the books, needing to look after them every day. In a sense, you become a servant of bugs.” Wu believes that when you are a paper conservator, simply having repair skills is not enough—you’ve got to continually read and research to extend your knowledge.
Lai Chih Hao likes to compare art restorers to doctors—and paintings in need of restoration to patients. Paintings, however, are silent patients unable to describe what ails them. It is the conservator’s job to examine them with the greatest care and prescribe the most efficacious treatment. “Compared with oil paintings in Europe, which are often three or four centuries old if not older, Taiwanese oil paintings are still very young,” Lai says.
The guqin is a seven-stringed fretless traditional Chinese musical instrument in the zither family. In 2003, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization announced that the guqin and its music would be added to the organization’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
