TIVAC and MMOT

I passed by TIVAC (Taiwan International Visual Arts Center) and the Miniatures Museum of Taiwan today (two more things to cross out on the "Sites and Exhibitions in Taipei" list).

TIVAC currently features an exhibition of rather private Mao Zedong pictures taken by a photographer couple, Xu Xiaobing and Hou Bo, who were close to Mao from 1938 to 1961 (they’re both over 80 now and live together in Beijing). Not surprisingly, the exhibition is somewhat disputed in Taiwan whereas the Mainland China media celebrated it as "a landmark debut" and "break of political taboo". A friend told me that her Taiwanese boyfriend got mad at this attempt to show Mao in a gentler light while in a Taiwanese tv report, they interviewed a university student who had just been in the exhibition and kept going on about how "intellectual" Mao was – yeah, right.

I had seen a lot of these pictures before – a German magazine ran an article on Xu Xiaobing and Hou Bo years ago when I was still at university and basically published the same pictures of Mao with his daughter or Mao resting.

Before leaving TIVAC, I leafed through their magazines and books and found a book with b/w photos, mostly portraits, taken in Taiwan between the 1920s and the 1950s by Deng Nanguang. I’ve been looking for some b/w pictures of Taiwan's recent past for a while now. A couple of weeks ago, there was an exhibition at the National History Museum, with pictures by Tsai Huifeng, taken in the 1960s. They were nice enough (I liked the ones featuring cats) but nothing special. The pictures by Deng Nanguang however are much better, they seem to have something extraordinary in their composition and expression (as far as I can tell, not that I would actually be in a position to judge pictures). Needless to say, I bought the book. And walked over to the Miniatures Museum.

The Miniatures Museum which I always thought exhibited miniature landscapes of whatever is actually more for kids or real hard-core doll-house aficionados but quite ok if you don’t mind that a) they have absolutely no English signs on the outside of its B1 location in a nondescript office building (which is weird enough considered that the museum is featured in every tourist map and museum guide); that b) they must have “forgotten” the English descriptions for half of the exhibits; that c) the available English descriptions were translated from Chinese by somebody non-native (some of the expressions are very obviously the first pick in the dictionary); that d) they play Kenny Loggins as background music and that e), very Taiwanese, they don’t wait with cleaning until AFTER closing but start about an hour before closing up so that you have to move out of the way of feather dusters and cleaning cloths if you happen to get there shortly before 6pm.