picks October 18, 2019

Ilse D’Hollander

Ilse D’Hollander’s first solo exhibition in Asia consists of thirteen small-scale oil paintings and eight even smaller gouache-on-paper works. Nine of the canvases were made in 1996, D’Hollander’s most productive year, the last before her tragic suicide at age twenty-eight. As with much of this Belgian artist’s humble oeuvre, everything on display is Untitled.

Throughout this show, rudimentary, harmonious shapes meld with a low-key palette to loosen the possibilities of two-dimensional space. Three gouache paintings from 1994 depict pastoral landscapes seen from above, abstracted into patches of

picks August 13, 2019

Kuo Yu-Ping

Kuo Yu-Ping’s solo exhibition “How Real is Yesterday” is an unsettling effort at grappling with Taiwan’s authoritarian displacements as refracted through the artist’s experience of home. Is Waking Up, 2019, the exhibition’s centerpiece, consists of an architectural model, placed in a space delineated by a beige, semitransparent curtain, of the Zhongxing Auditorium in Kuo’s native Zhongxing New Village, Taiwan—one of a large number of structures based on Chinese architectural precedents built by the Kuomintang party-state in the wake of their defeat in the Chinese Civil War. Water pours out of

picks June 14, 2019

Wu Hao

This retrospective of work by Wu Hao—one of the founders of the postwar Taiwanese modernist art collective Ton Fan Art Group—provides a glimpse into the variety of styles that the esteemed painter has employed over his five-decade career. The subjects of Wu’s figurative canvases tend to have a paper doll–like character, their usually female forms sometimes adopting slanted postures beyond the range of realistic human movement. The women’s vividly printed costumes and makeup in Youth, 1994, Clown, 1993, and Sway, 2009—which could be interpreted as depicting many people dancing side by side or

picks November 11, 2018

Lai Chiu-Chen

“Bubble Limited Company,” the title of Lai Chiu-Chen’s solo exhibition, refers to a fictional soap-bubble company of which the artist is the make-believe president. It’s a conceit that nicely captures the buoyant authority, the playfulness and pop, that his show exudes. In the eighteen large acrylic paintings here, Lai has placed anime characters amid abstract patterns to riff on geometric abstraction and Pop art, enlisting not only iconic Western cartoons, including Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and Casper the Friendly Ghost, but also Japanese mascots such as Slime, a teardrop character from the

Brian Hioe