Zao-ang (走尪) ritual in Wujie Township, Ilan County

The following are some picks I took of the Zao-ang (走尪) festival in Ilan this past weekend. The ritual takes place once a year on the 15 day of the first month of the Lunar Year to pay respect to Mazu, a local goddess, and banish pestilence and evil spirits.

While Westerners spend their New Years partying and making resolutions for the coming year, the Lunar New Year in Taiwan brings with it a variety of colorful rituals meant to purify believers and bring luck for the coming year. Zao-ang is a lesser known ritual, though one that has become increasingly popular for tourism over the past few years.

Zao-ang now has two parts: a competition (begun six years ago) and the ritual itself (begun, according to temple officials, 200 years ago). The competition runs over a two-day period and ends on the second day with the second, older, ritual - one that begins with a pilgrimage around the village and ends with a firewalking (過火) ceremony. In between, there are firecrackers to scare the hell out of ghosts (or scare them back to hell), performance troupes to entertain Mazu and, what all photographers come to see, the firewalking ceremony.

This year, 54 male and female teams competed - two teams at a time - in 5 categories to win the NT$30,000 prize (C$1,000) as well as added protection from Mazu.

I have pasted a copy of my introductory article at the bottom of this post.



Teams are made up of four people. Each team carries a sedan chair with Mazu. The rain on day one didn't seem to dampen anyone's spirits.


These shots feature teams running like mad down Wujie's "Old Street." Above is a men's team and below are two teams of young women.



The shots above and below, taken with my recently purchased telephoto lens (I'm still trying to understand how to use the bloody thing) feature teams just going over the finish line.



After the competition ends, traditional performance troupes () perform in front of the temple as a way to show their respect to Mazu. These troupes are hired by the temple - the more acts hired, the thinking goes, the richer the temple. A temple's wealth results from its perceived efficacy by believers (who donate considerable amounts of money for Mazu's help or protection).


The frenetic activity of Taiwan's night markets finds its origins in the boisterous temple pageantry of firework displays, dancing generals and pungent incense.





After the final performance by the hired troupes, local politicians, temple officials and residents from the surrounding villages (those who pay tribute to this temple's Mazu) run back and forth in front of the temple to "re-charge" their mini-god's power.


Then, bags full of paper money (burned for gods and ghosts to have extra cash in the netherworld) are laid out in front of the temple and then lit on fire.


Local residents the carry their sedan chairs over the burning money in a ritual called "firewalking" (過火).


The entire Zao-ang ends with "three in and three out" (三進三出) - a ritual whereby the sedan chair with god moves into and out from the temple three times.




When the ritual is finished, bystanders (and the hundreds of photographers present) can then jump over the flaming money so as to give them luck for the coming year.


Story from Taipei Times

On your mark, get set ...

Some thirst for the excitement of dodging fireworks at the Beehive Firecracker Festival (鹽水蜂炮) in Tainan County’s Yenshui Township, while others risk severe burning at ceremonies like Taitung’s Bombing of Master Han Dan (炸寒單). But for the past seven years, Lize Village (利澤村) in IIan County (宜蘭縣) has been holding a safer activity for Lantern Festival, though one that’s retained the celebratory atmosphere.

Known as the God’s Sedan Chair Race (走尪), the two-day competition, which begins on Sunday, takes place every year on the 15th day of the first Lunar month on Lize’s Old Street (利澤老街), located in the heart of Wuchieh Village.

“It’s the only competition of its kind in Taiwan,” said Wang Chang-fu (王長福), head of the Lize Community Development Association (利澤社區發展協會).

The competition sees teams of four race a palanquin, made with a chair affixed to two bamboo poles, 120m down Lize’s old street. Last year 55 teams competed for the NT$30,000 prize, and organizers expect as many or more competitors this year.

The local government and the Temple of Eternal Peace (永安宮), located at the far end of Old Street, jointly run the competition. And though the temple’s name evokes images of serenity and bliss, the ritual’s history is less than peaceful.

Wang said the race began as a procession devoted to Mazu (媽祖) more than 200 years ago. Villagers believed that worshipping the goddess could help banish evil spirits and prevent disease. The sedan race developed into a competition between nearby villages at the end of the Qing Dynasty and continued into the Japanese colonial period.

But what began as a friendly contest soon led to fierce rivalry between the villages. “There were intense disputes over which team was first past the post because there was no accurate way of measuring who crossed the finish line first,” Wang said.

Arguments and fisticuffs prompted local officials to suspend the sport indefinitely.

In 2000 the local government resurrected the event to boost tourism. To avoid any disputes, Wang said, they began using laser technology similar to that used at sports competitions to accurately determine the winner.

The two-day event also features a number of carnivalesque activities and concludes with teams engaging in a fire-walking (過火) ritual. Those wanting to catch the official ceremony on Sunday are advised to leave early as it begins at 8:30am.

Looking into the past

TFAM’s thought-provoking Jewels of 25 Years Museum Collection illustrates how the public exhibition system under the Japanese colonial and martial law-era KMT governments strongly influenced what art was produced and consumed

Photos courtesy of TFAM

Chen Cheng-po’s (陳澄波) artistic career ended at the beginning of the White Terror period. Chen, who was born in Chiayi just before Japan’s annexation of Taiwan in 1895, favored tranquil pastoral scenes in his impressionistic canvases. His painting Street of Chiayi (嘉義街外) was the first work by a Taiwanese artist to be exhibited at Japan’s Empire Art Exhibition, in 1926, and back home he wielded considerable influence over Taiwan’s burgeoning art scene. A few weeks after the 228 Incident, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) troops seized and executed him in front of a train station.

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s (TFAM) recently opened exhibit Jewels of 25 Years Museum Collection (25年典藏精粹) includes two of Chen’s pre-World War II paintings, Soochow (蘇州) and Street Scene on a Summer Day (夏日街景). By placing both works immediately at the beginning of the exhibit, which spaces 31 paintings and three sculptures throughout seven rooms on its second floor, TFAM directs the viewer’s attention to how art and politics interacted during Taiwan’s colorful past. Organized for the most part chronologically, from the middle of the Japanese colonial period to the 1990s, the pieces on display were chosen from among the 4,000 works in the museum’s possession because, according to the exhibit’s literature, they “illustrate the development of Taiwan’s art history.”

This show does just that. But in the process it also reveals how two occupying powers, through a policy of acculturation, imposed their aesthetic views on Taiwanese artists, resulting in a repetition of styles and lack of innovation — especially when compared to the artistic movements flourishing in European painting that found their center in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, in American painting centered around New York after the 1950s and up to the 1970s, and in Taiwanese painting just before and after the lifting of martial law in 1987.

The early works on display were a product of or were influenced by the Taiwan Art Exhibition, or Taiten, a public exhibition that was held annually starting in 1927. The exhibition, which was later renamed the Taiwan Governor-General’s Art Exhibition, or Futen, was aimed at promoting the cultural superiority of Japanese art, and Chinese calligraphy and ink painting were conspicuously absent because the colonial government wanted its Taiwanese subjects to follow the methods of Japanese painting, then a combination of traditional Japanese styles and Western realism known as nihonga.

These Japanese-derived methods are clearly discernable in Chen Chin’s (陳進) Leisurely (悠閒) and Lin Chih-chu’s (林之助) Recess (小閒). Adhering to the bijinga (美人畫, “painting of beautiful women”) technique of representing women popular in Japan, Chen Chin’s light brushstrokes and alluring colors show a woman reclining in a drawing room. The three waitresses in Lin’s canvas are dressed in dark-toned navy uniforms and idle around a stove in a coffee shop, evoking the uncomplicated composition so loved by Japanese art critics of the time.

Although Taiwanese artists under imperial rule were expected to strictly conform to a Japanese aesthetic, their work is notable for its focus on Taiwan’s scenery. Lin Yu-shan’s (林玉山) detailed portrayal of a farmer with water buffalo in On the Way Home (歸途), Kuo Hsueh-hu’s (郭雪湖) colorful depiction of Taipei’s famous Dihua Street (迪化街) during the Lunar New Year in Festival on South Street (南街殷賑) and Huang Tu-shui’s (黃土水) combination of traditional folk art with modern sculptural elements in Sakya all employ the Japanese attention to detail and vibrant color while showing a concern for Taiwan’s folk culture and landscapes. All trained in Japan or by Japanese artists, Lin, Kuo and Huang won top honors at the Taiten several times.

Regime change after World War II witnessed a return to Chinese aesthetic mores in the cultural field. The KMT continued where the Japanese left off with a policy of controlling the creation and consumption of art through exhibitions and education. During the first three decades of KMT rule, local artists were forced to submit to Chinese aesthetic standards if they wanted to show their work at exhibitions, and artists trained in the orthodox literati traditions of ink painting and calligraphy gained recognition at these exhibitions. The Japanese-era use of Western realism with a focus on Taiwanese scenes was replaced by ink paintings of imaginary landscapes in China and calligraphy.

Apart from some interesting calligraphy-inspired modernist works by Chinese artists — Chen Ting-shi’s (陳庭詩) Lust of Life (生之慾) is a notable work of abstraction that blends a Chinese aesthetic with modern visual elements — the appeal of most of the calligraphy and ink paintings on display is limited to the small cadre of experts who have been trained to appreciate them. Although most viewers will probably move through these rooms quickly, the martial law-era works provide a stark contrast to the paintings from the Japanese colonial period and direct the viewer’s attention to the momentous changes that took place in Taiwan’s cultural sphere.

If the earlier Japanese and Nationalist periods feature works copying foreign styles imposed from above, the works in the exhibit covering the post-martial law era are notable for their innovation and originality in representation. The imaginary renderings of a lost land (China) by an earlier generation give way to a political and historical awakening among contemporary artists and a focus on the place they currently inhabit (Taiwan).

Yang Mao-ling’s (楊茂林) ironic diptych Zealandia Memorandum L9301 (熱蘭遮紀事 L9301) displays two impressionistic portraits of Taiwan’s European and Asian colonial past, while Wu Tien-chang (吳天章) openly portrays the many phases of Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) rule in Five Phases of President Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國的五個時期). Fire (火) by Huang Chin-ho (黃進河) raises taike (台客) to high art. The blue flip-flops might be absent, but the flora of rural Taiwan, betel nut beauties and the paper houses constructed for burning in folk rituals are present and rendered in chromatic yellows, green and purple.

Hou Chun-ming’s (侯俊明) wood-block print series combines the ancient tradition of placing Buddhist text beside religious folk images. In God’s Searching (搜神), he retains the typology but replaces the religious iconography with sexually explicit (and often violent) images rendered in comic book simplicity. Chen Chieh-jen’s (陳界仁) black-and-white video installation Lingchi — Echoes of a Historical Photograph (凌遲考：一張歷史照片的迴音) recreates a photograph of a form of torture common at the end of the Qing Dynasty and acts as a commentary on colonization and the gaze of the oppressor.

Interestingly, the post-martial law art is displayed before the martial law-era art, creating a jarring contrast between the vibrancy and originality of the former and the second-hand feel of the latter. While the Jewels of 25 Years Museum Collection does not explicitly suggest that authoritarian regimes — at least in Taiwan’s case — stifle innovation in art, it is difficult to imagine that it was not organized with this thought in mind.

State of ambivalence

TFAM’s current group exhibit explores Taiwan’s history, myths, folk culture and identity through the work of eight painters and sculptors

Photos courtesy of TFAM

Those depressed over the government’s reality-defying rapprochement with China can take solace in Madden Reality: Post-Taipei Art Group (叛離異象:後台北畫派), a recently opened exhibit on the third floor of the Taipei Fine Art Museum.

The works on display — paintings and sculpture culled from a group of artists who seek to reveal something about the psyche of the country’s people — can be seen as an antidote to the Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration’s fixation with placating Beijing at the expense of Taiwan’s identity and sovereignty.

The exhibit features 72 works by eight artists who formed an artist collective called the Hantoo Art Group (悍圖社), which literally means, “defending pictures.” Begun in 1998 as a response to the art community’s perceived obsession with conceptual art, Hantoo had splintered away from the Taipei Art Group (台北畫派) — itself a collective of artists known for their fervent social commentary in the wake of the lifting of martial law in 1987. Whereas the earlier incarnation was fueled by a desire to portray Taiwan’s social gashes, warts and scars, Hantoo takes an introspective approach, while remaining engaged in the exploration of the nation’s history, myths, folk culture and identity — much of it with a dose of playfulness.

Caricature mixed with a sense of ambivalence toward their subjects characterise the works of Wu Tien-chang (吳天章) and Kuo Wei-guo (郭維國).

In Wu’s digital print Being in the Same Boat (同舟共濟), four smiling clowns dressed in bright yellow costumes stand on striped stilts and attempt to row a dragon boat through a vague landscape rendered in metallic blue and purple. It is not clear where the clowns are going or why they are rowing the boat on land rather than water. And yet they appear happy in their quixotic efforts to reach an unknown goal. Sharing a similar burlesque aesthetic (and a tendency towards the monumental in canvas size), Kuo’s bizarre Mr Desperado’s Fancy Car of Leather Shoe (黛絲不拉多先生的皮鞋花車) shows the artist driving an old leather shoe while embracing a stuffed rabbit. The lit fuse (reminiscent of the kind used with dynamite) in the boot’s toe creates tension and hints that this scene will soon explode.

Artificial materials enclosing the natural world are recurring images found in Lien Chien-hsin’s (連建興) imaginative canvases. Sharks, seals and tortoises share the same aquarium in Secret Dance in Frivolous Mood 2 (隱舞情弄2). Concrete, glass and metal enclose the creatures and replace the natural environment. The work leaves the viewer with a feeling of confinement rather than the title’s ironic suggestion of frivolous play.

Similar to Lien’s animal captivity, Lu Hsien-ming (陸先銘) portrays what amounts to human internment in metropolitan centers — the effects of Taiwan’s rapid industrialization over the past half century. No evidence is given of the island’s natural beauty. Instead, the mixed media canvases rendered in darkened tones of blue and gray depict concrete urban centers with a sense of loneliness. This is made explicit in Hesitation (躇) in which an elderly man with his back facing the viewer stands alone in a doorway waiting for a bus with only the silhouette of deserted buildings in the background to keep him company.

If many of the artists portray their imaginative worlds in a realistic fashion, Lee Ming-jong (李民中) and Yang Jen-ming (楊仁明) take their work in a different direction by employing more abstract techniques to reveal the musings of the subconscious. Less pessimistic about the destruction of Taiwan’s once Arcadian vistas, Lee’s expressionist Four Seasons (四季) interprets the multitude of colors and shapes found in Taiwan’s natural environment. Yang’s four-panel Unstable Ties-Happening (不安定的聯結—發生中) is an abstract rendering of the explosion of light — here in yellows, reds and whites — after the creation of the world.

It has been said that these artists are following in the footsteps of other, Western, artists who employ irony and satire to reveal uncertainty. Perhaps. And yet it seems natural for these interpreters of Taiwan — where it is not uncommon for people to identify more with China, Japan or the US than they do with their own country — to infuse their work with images that bemuse as much as they equivocate. The exhibit for the most part astounds in its diversity of styles and control over materials used and moves beyond status quo expectations of recent (and generally banal) trends in contemporary art.

A chip off the old block

Photo courtesy of Taiwan National Museum of History

“Plants, the wind, snails, frogs, birds and fishes, all display the beauty of the coast around Lugang (鹿港) and the ecology of Taiwan.”

Apt words written by master carver Huang Ma-ching (黃媽慶) to describe some of the flora and fauna found in and around the old port town located on the central-west coast of Taiwan, an area known for its tradition of woodcarving.

The National Museum of History is currently displaying more than 50 of Huang’s sculptures that cover the past decade and reflect the artist’s deep respect for the country’s environment.

Approaching the narrow hall on the second floor that houses the exhibit, the smell of camphor (樟木) — Huang’s preferred medium — serves as a palliative to the funk of Taipei’s streets.

The carvings on display are collated from Huang’s earlier series variously titled Nature, Lotus, Sea, Gourd and Transmission. The works depict the farming and fishing culture of Changhua County, where Lugang is located, and lend the exhibition a rustic feel. But nature, rather than the area’s traditional subsistence lifestyle, is Huang’s primary preoccupation.

Sponge Cucumbers (絲瓜系列) is representative of Huang’s stand-alone carvings. The intricately sculpted wavy lines of the cucumber’s body converge just below the rough stem and the single wilted leaf is suggestive of autumn. A solitary snail sits on the vegetable’s body and reminds the viewer that more than just farmers gain sustenance from agriculture. The wilted leaf at the stem’s summit is a brilliant flourish both because it hints at nature’s life cycle while at the same time demonstrating Huang’s considerable carving skill.

Huang began his career at the age of 14 as an apprentice under the tutelage of Wang Jin-xuan (王錦宣), a master sculptor who taught him to carve intricate designs on temples as well as Japanese-style latticework transoms — elements of which are discernable in his work over the past two years that show detailed scenes of insects and vegetables.

Though not as spectacular as the stand-alone works, these framed sculptures are detailed to the point of obsession.

One criticism, though minor, is that the museum director’s words are used to introduce the exhibit. A third of those words are given over to a brief history of Chinese sculpture that, though interesting, is only indirectly related to Huang’s work and the sculptures on display. It would have been far more edifying to use Huang’s own words (found in the preface to a book of Huang’s work located at the exhibit’s entrance) because he explicates more clearly his influences and goals as an artist.

Still, the museum has done an admirable job in displaying the works of one of Taiwan’s finest masters of wood sculpture.

Canvases in motion

Image courtesy of Metaphysical Gallery

Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa greets visitors as they enter Metaphysical Gallery’s latest exhibition. Only this one has eyes that move and follow the lugubrious movements of small aircraft that fly in front of her dropping parachutists.

Monalisa’s Smile is the first of 15 video installations, collectively titled Myth Inside Monitor, by South Korean artist Lee Lee Nam. It is ideally placed in the entranceway to the gallery both because it lures the viewer in further and hints at the content of the other works.

Lee begins each work with an iconic painting culled from the Western or Eastern painterly cannons (sometimes both together in the same work) and, using digital technology, adds his own visual elements. What emerge are sublime meditations on the various cycles found in nature and the contrast between the natural world of plants, insects and animals, and the human-created world of visual art and architecture. The running time of each video ranges from three minutes to 10 minutes.

The Conversation Between Monet and Sochee brings together many of the phenomena Lee investigates, such as day and night and the contrast between tradition and modernity.

Two 19th-century paintings —an Asian landscape painting by South Korean artist Sochee (whose real name is Huh Ryun) and an impressionist landscape by Claude Monet — are placed together side by side, highlighting the differences between the two styles of art. As the video progresses the

paintings begin to interact, seasons change and day turns into night. The foreground comes alive with the

movement of the painting’s original characters (in this case fishermen), while a cityscape emerges in the background.

Lee seems preoccupied with the differences between natural landscapes and his own digitally created cityscapes. Large illuminated buildings and cranes emerge in the craggy rocks of a traditional Korean mountain scene in New Genmgangjeondo. Another video, Circulation — Nature — Human-2, shows a single rock jutting out from a body of water — a metaphor, perhaps, for the Earth. The rock, which at first provides a home for trees and shrubs, becomes the surface for a city that gradually emerges.

The Landscape of Moon Jar-2 playfully shows the four seasons in progression and the effect each one has on the “moon jar.” Butterflies dance around a blossoming branch that juts out of the white porcelain jar. As the seasons pass, the joyous butterflies disappear, petals fall from the branch, and snow falls gently onto the surface of the wood and jar.

Not content simply to have monitors hanging from the walls, Lee embeds them into a variety of objects. The remarkable Digital Eight-fold Screen is, as the title suggests, eight folding screens, each with a monitor displaying a traditional work of art. Korea — Towards the New World employs the same idea, except here the monitors are significantly smaller — the size of a credit card and almost as thin — and serve as the masts of a boat.

One minor criticism of the exhibit is that seating is not provided — a flaw that might inhibit visitors from giving the works the contemplation they so readily deserve.