This section gathers more casual content: photo galleries, opinion pieces, administrative announcements, and other miscellaneous stuff. Think of this as the old-fashioned blog within the wider site, much less polished and generally less serious.
Last winter I stayed in an apartment near the train station in Changhua City for about six months. This post is all about that apartment: why I decided to move there, how I found the place, what it cost, what the amenities were like, and so on. I am sharing this information mainly for other non-Taiwanese and nomadic types interested in exiting the Taipei bubble without necessarily speaking a lot of (or any) Chinese or even knowing much about Taiwan. This isn’t meant to be an endorsement of living in such a place, it’s simply a straight-forward account of what it was like. But first of all, why move south? And why Changhua of all places?
An Atlas moth perched on the leg of a chair at a Hakka restaurant in Taoyuan, Taiwan.
Last week I went out for a day of exploration with Josh Ellis who brought me to the excellent Lǎotóubǎi Hakka Restaurant (老頭擺客家餐廳 in Longtan, Taoyuan. This restaurant is operated out of an old farmhouse (or sanheyuan, a traditional Taiwanese courtyard home) so I wandered around to take a look at each room before our meal arrived. Stepping out into the courtyard an employee gestured toward a giant moth perched on the leg of a chair. I had seen Neil Wade post one just like it on Facebook a few days prior to this so I wasn’t exactly surprised—but wow is it ever big!
Live fast, live forever! Inexplicable satanic hipster fashion as seen at Tonghua Night Market. This looks like a second generation copy of the black and white original.
In addition to their reputation for novelty foods, night markets in Taiwan also offer an almost endless variety of cheap goods, particularly clothing and accessories. Some of the fast, low-cost garments found at Taiwanese night markets are amusing, quirky, provocative, bizarre, or even incoherent, though some of it is also quite clever. My understanding is that many of the more unusual products originates in China, where massive factories churn out garments emblazoned with English text and pop culture references without regard for semantic meaning. This is almost certainly the result of copying passages from print or online media, using machine translation, or sheer laziness, but it might also be for aesthetic effect. Transcription errors are common, particularly when popular designs are copied by competing factories. Observed on the scale of years there is something almost evolutionary at work in night market fashion—styles mutate and are subject to a kind of natural selection. To celebrate the absurdity of this curious cultural phenomena I have assembled about 40 photos from my many visits to the night markets of Taiwan, almost all of which I have previously shared on my Instagram account, the perfect vehicle for such inanity. Enjoy!
Recently my work on this site was featured in an article by Nien Ping Yu (于念平) for the Chinese language web magazine BIOS Monthly. The article, loosely translated as Canadian Cultural Blogger: Even Unremarkable Places Have History (加拿大文化部落客: 再平凡的地方都有歷史), was based on a sprawling conversation we had in person rather than an email questionnaire. Mostly we spoke about themes and practices commonly seen on this blog: discovering history through the exploration of lost and neglected places, revealing intriguing connections through observations of synchronicity, and using photography as a documentarian medium rather than focusing solely on aesthetic appeal.
My photo of a haunted hotel in Okinawa in LIFE Books.
Last year one of my photos from Nakagusuku Kogen Hotel (中城高原ホテル) was picked up by LIFE Books for the publication of The World’s Most Haunted Places. I have yet to complete my own write-up of this fantastical and awe-inspiring ruin in Okinawa but I will certainly get around to it sooner or later. Appearing in a LIFE publication of any kind is also pretty cool even if it isn’t the original magazine, which my mother used to collect and keep around the house while I was growing up. She proudly bought a couple copies when she heard the news and the special hit the supermarket stands back home in Canada.
A bizarre work of public art in the bowels of Taipei Station.
This striking installation is one of the more iconic and well-known works of public art in Taipei. Created by artists Hé Cǎiróu (何采柔) and Guō Wéntài (郭文泰) in 2009, it is entitled The World in Aves’ Eyes (愛維思看世界), Birdperson (鳥人), or Daydreams (夢遊) and can be found somewhere in the labyrinthine passageways beneath Taipei Railway Station (臺北火車站). Apart from the obvious, the immature, androgynous figure holds a pencil in its right hand (never to write a word), water continuously seeps from its neck, and its feet show the signs of a mild case of pigeon toe, a condition that should be familiar to anyone who has seen young Taiwanese posing for photographs.
Curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, the Taipei Biennial 2014 was held at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (臺北市立美術館) in Zhongshan from September into the early part of the new year. The theme is “art in the age of the anthropocene”, the current geophysical epoch defined by humankind’s enormous impact on the natural world. From the curator’s notes: this exhibition is organized around the cohabitation of human consciousness with swarming animals, data processing, the rapid growth of plants and the slow movements of matter. I am no serious critic but I certainly appreciate thought-provoking art when I see it. Since I haven’t any expertise in this area I’m mostly going to let the photos speak for themselves, however incomprehensible that might be. Much like the Xu Bing retrospective it was an inspiring experience so I’d like to have a record of it here on my blog.
People often ask me what camera I use, presumably because they like my photography and figure I must have a bunch of high-end equipment. Usually I laugh, somewhat awkwardly, as my gear isn’t anything special—in fact, it’s about as shabby as can be circa 2016.
Sunday afternoon in the mountains of Shilin, not far from Yangmingshan, about 200 people gathered for The Forester’s Party (牧神的遊戲) at Siu Siu (少少原始感覺研究室), a lab of primitive senses built on a steep south-facing slope. The aesthetics of the space: slate grey walls, wooden planks underfoot on the dance floor, a round black mesh canopy overhead screening the forest without impeding the flow of fresh mountain air. Clean, modern, minimal, but also rustic—an exceedingly comfortable combination of form and function. The finest in dub techno wafting out of the speakers, one particular song selected by Al Burro capturing the mood of the afternoon with perfect ease, Nthng’s 1996.
