Archive for March, 2007
If you’re in Taipei for the weekend, Taipei Artist Village (TAV) is having an Open Studios Weekend. The building facilities are quite good, each artist has a private windowed live/work studio situation equipped with a bathroom and kitchen area. TAV is centrally located in the oldest district in Taipei, just a block or two from the Taipei Main Station as well as the ‘red-light’ district, tame in comparison to other ‘red-light’ districts in the world. Late at night, you can find rows of black and silver mercedes belonging, I suspect, to the taiwanese mafia 黑色會(hei1 se4 hui4), brazenly sitting on the sidewalk outside of “massage” parlors, and drunk men with one man’s arm draped over the other’s back weaving in and out of traffic.
But back to the art, I thought one young Japanese performance/video/installation artist Yuki Okumura, who completed a residency at Location One in Summer 2006, was pretty promising although some works were too neatly packaged for my tastes. Here are some images posted on the TAV website. The small TV screen shows a work, I think is called “supernova.” The last few seconds of footage that flickers across a television screen when the power plug is pulled is captured on video. This act is repeated many times, possibly on more than one television–I can’t seem to remember– and the final piece is made up of all of these sequences strung together, one after the other. He pulls some Tom Friedman stunts using bodily products as sculptural material to create a piece, sometimes extending it into a performance. I would say he was a hit at the Open Studios, except a performance and workshop led my a ‘new circus’ performer drew a formidable crowd.
My friend Mark Forscher just started this new blog. Smart concept and design. Check it out here!
This past weekend, I went to a protest and awareness concert at Le Sheng 樂生 Sanatorium, an aging leper colony located on the outskirts of Taipei. The 70-year old community, created during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, is currently in a fight with the Taipei County government to preserve their homes. In 2003, the government began tearing down the sanatorium to begin construction of a new MRT line, without the consent of the patients who have been living there since 1930. The plan was to move the remaining occupants (unsure of the #, maybe 200 or so) into a nearby hospital. A group of student volunteers, along with their professors and members of the leper community have been staging protests for over four years to preserve what is left of the community. From what I could see, less than 1/3rd of the existing buildings are left and the few remaining homes and hospitals are located up on the side of a small mountain.
I may go back again this weekend for another visit. Students from universities all over Taipei have been camped out with the lepers for weeks now and this weekend there will be another protest and concert. Apart from the horror of kicking aging citizens out of their homes of more than 70 years, another historic and beautiful neighborhood in Taiwan is in danger of disappearing. You can find old english articles and blog commentaries about the situation here and here.
I need to memorize this by tomorrow
在台灣有些人晚上喜歡逛百貨公司，因為地方乾淨東西的種頛多，而且晚上九點半才休息。可是因為價錢比較高，又不能講價，有的人就不喜歡逛了。對這些人來說，夜市的地攤跟小商店才更合他們的口味。會講價的人常常能用最低的價錢買到自己喜歡的東西。講價就成了一種樂趣。
在夜市不但可以買東西，還可一以看看逛街的人，玖玖擲飛鏢那樣的遊戲，在小吃攤前坐下，嘗嘗各種口味的美食。吃飽了，再去試試衣服，鞋子，聽聽新出來的錄音帶，跟地攤老闆隋便聊聊．．．．只要你走得動，愛逛多久就逛多久。
當然，一分前一分貨。在地攤上買東西，如果沒有服光，就可能買到假的，不好的東西。小吃攤也不一是都乾淨，逛夜市的人就得自己小心了！
My beef noodle soup smiled at me today.
Hello everyone. I am starting an online journal to document my time in Asia this upcoming year. Between goodreads, del.icio.us, myspace and flickr, it seems ridiculous to create another online identity but I’m hoping that this can become my virtual sketchbook to fill with photographs, drawings, ideas, etc… Without further ado, I present to you Sweet & Salty, a compendium of Taiwanese flavors from the rainy and misty foothills of Yanming Mountain in Taipei.
