This is Just to Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

yao2 yan2 zhi3 yu2 zhi4 zhe3

rumours stop at/stopped by the wise/intelligent

Meaning, smart people pay no attention to rumours and most importantly, don’t pass them on.

This past weekend, I flew to Penghu, an archipelago off the southwest coast of Taiwan, almost parallel with Kaoshiung. Apart from the relatively new airport, a McDonald’s and a few scattered 7-11′s, Penghu could be Taiwan 50 years ago. Low walls made of coral line the quiet and nearly empty roads. The crowds, traffic, noise and pollution one normally finds in Taipei are nonexistent here.

I also rode a scooter for the first time in Taiwan on the island of Chimei. !!

This past weekend, I helped work on a mural. It’s going to be a map highlighting some of the historical houses in our neighborhood and will include pictures of the birds, flowers and trees indigenous to yangmingshan. We were only able to get the base coat down–it’s a long wall!–but it looks great already. When we started, I was skeptical of the green hue but after the paint dried, the color brightened and the surface became glossier.

As a treat, my ma took me to a restaurant so famous for its ground beef filled fried bun-like things that it only opens its doors for dinner. Like any other well-known and tasty eating spot in Taipei, the line goes out the door. In fact, if you are unsure of where to eat in Taipei, just go to any restaurant that is incredibly crowded. Anytime I see a small food stand with a line that snakes around the block, I unquestioningly step in line to see what they have to offer.

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.