ASIA

Elderly politicians bust a move

Su Beng, considered one of the significant founding figures of Taiwanese independence, is best known for his four-volume magnum opus, Taiwan’s Four Hundred Year History. Born during the Japanese colonial period as Shih Chao-hui and having converted to left-wing political views while studying abroad in Japan, Su traveled to China to act as a spy for the CCP.

RYUICHI SAKAMOTO and Shiro Takatani’s art installation, “Is Your Time,” proves a powerful meditation on the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. This is presented through the piano at the centerpiece of the installation, which was discovered by Sakamoto in the ruins of a building in the affected Fukushima prefecture, left behind by its owners—wherever they might be now.

Weird colonial propaganda in Australian schools

An Interview About Soundctuary (音廟) at Treasure Hill

A Review of A Century of Craftsmanship—The Wanhua Story

Where Taiwanese politics are concerned, pants have sometimes been figured as a symbol of…masculinity. This is not just pan-Blue. Pan-green Taiwanese independence activist Koo Kwang-ming once lashed out at President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s first female president, by claiming that he could not stomach a skirt-wearing woman leading the ROC military.

Cameos of real-life political figures are sprinkled throughout the show—New Party youth spokesperson Wang Bing-chung, who faced charges of being a Chinese spy in 2017, is among those to appear so far in a role as a TV announcer. Legendary Taiwanese punk rock bank LTK Commune, known for its left-wing, pro-independence political stance, too, appears in the first episode.

No Man is an Island interviewed Kelvin Chan Kin-long (陳健朗), the director of Hand Rolled Cigarette (手捲煙).

For how long had I been doing this? A hundred days, or 10,000 years?

SID AND GERI is a Taiwanese visual creator and maker of short films, exploring themes of identity, the body, and the peculiarities of human culture through the mixed mediums of animation, special effects, and live-action skits, often all spliced together into one jarring video. They are arguably more well-known for the music videos they have directed for Taiwanese musicians, the most recent of which being the video for “寶貝好壞 Baby Is So Bad” by Mars Ma (馬念先).

FATHER (爺爺和父親) is a standout documentary, whose strengths primarily derive from the revealing moments it manages to capture on camera. This is due to the fact that director Deng Wei is filming his father and grandfather as the documentary’s subjects.

A Review of Episodes One and Two of SEQALU: Formosa 1967 (斯卡羅)