1. 2025 Taipei Art Awards

2025臺北美術獎 2025 Taipei Art Awards 2025.12.13 – 2026.04.26 Taipei Fine Art Museum

Held by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the Taipei Art Awards and its subsequent exhibition aim to discover the year’s promising rising stars. It is an opportunity to explore trends in the work of younger artists. For the 2025 show, the winning artists seem to focus on the overall experience, creating a body of work that connects and creates a unified ambience rather than forming a collection of individual pieces, as has been the case in the past.

Wang Guan-Jhen’s installation reveals the relationship between thinking and drawing in her practice. She builds a room within a room: paintings are displayed outside, while daily drawings appear inside. This spatial arrangement creates a dialogue between interior and exterior, revealing drafts that relate directly to the paintings and connect inner thought with outward expression.

Shiu Jui-Tsz explores the relationship between labor, value, and play through an interactive environment. Drawing from her experience working in a restaurant, she turns the space into a hybrid kitchen-playground composed of games. Moving from one game to another, viewers walk through a system that questions the equivalence between wages earned through work and points accumulated in play.

Hsieh Chi-Sun frames his exhibition room as part of an ongoing artistic process. In On My Way, a video and installation function as fragments of his long-term “house” project. Rather than independent works, they appear as temporary stops within a larger, unfinished continuum.

Su Jui-Hao constructs an immersive environment that emphasises exploration and viewers’ perception of space. Using flashlights, viewers navigate a dark room filled with discarded remnants and second-hand objects, gradually realising that the entire space functions as a single artwork.

Ultimately, most of the artists appear to have carefully considered how to organise a space and shape the overall audience experience, rather than presenting discrete works separately. Further evidence might be that the “How to experience the work” label is much larger than the works’ labels themselves. (Elanor Wang)

2. Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo

Lucas Arruda個展 Lucas Arruda: Deserto-Modelo 2026.01.31-05.31 文心藝所 Winsing Art Place

At first glance, Arruda’s small, atmospheric landscapes may recall Claude Monet or Vincent van Gogh. Yet his approach is fundamentally different. Rather than painting from observation, Arruda works from memory. The forests, seascapes, horizons, and bursts of light that emerge in his paintings are not depictions of specific places but landscapes of the mind. This idea is embedded in the exhibition’s title and in the name of his long-running series, Deserto-Modelo (Desert Model). Borrowed from the late Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto, the term refers to the desert as a metaphor for an atemporal space, one that resists language and representation.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors are often struck by the intimate scale of the paintings. Though the scenes feel vast, even theatrical at times, each canvas is remarkably small. Arruda has explained that he prefers not to overwhelm the viewer with large formats. Instead, he constructs intense, self-contained worlds within surfaces sometimes as small as 20 to 30 square centimeters. The scale invites viewers to lean in, to engage closely with the layered brushstrokes and subtle shifts in color.

Light and horizon lie at the core of Arruda’s practice. Light does not simply illuminate his scenes; it emerges gradually through the accumulation and delicate rubbing of existing pigments after the figurative structure has taken shape. As a result, it often appears understated, drawing the viewer into a careful act of looking. The horizon, meanwhile, reflects his affinity with Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose work seeks the most primordial image humanity has witnessed. By defining this elemental division between sky and earth, Arruda creates a framework through which color and light can fully unfold.

Beyond the paintings, Arruda has also created four site-specific installations in the café area of Wensing Art Place. Using subtly differentiated pigments applied directly to the walls, paired with custom-colored lighting, he once again constructs a tranquil, minimal landscape. (iying)

3. Into Eternity: Giacometti, Miró, Calder

步入永恆：賈科梅蒂、米羅、考爾德 Into Eternity: Giacometti, Miró, Calder 2025.12.24 – 2026.4.20 Fubon Art Museum

Within a sun-drenched gallery, framed by a vast window overlooking a verdant sweep of willow trees, a gaunt, elongated figure appears to stride into the distance. It was there, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, that I first encountered Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man. The moment coincided with my first solo trip abroad—a journey that began to reshape my understanding of what solitude could mean.

Giacometti developed this iconic series of figures under the collective trauma of World War II. Compared with his, my own feelings may seem trivial, even self-indulgent. However, having recently gone through a painful parting, I can’t quite put into words the jolt that ran through me when I stepped into the gallery at Fubon Art Museum.

Two of Giacometti’s attenuated figures, Walking Man I and Standing Woman II, with their gnarled and eroded surfaces, loom with a silent, but heavy presence within the void of the gallery. Although I found the enlarged photographic print of Fondation Maeght (the lender) to their right to be visually intrusive, the way these two figures are positioned against the frantic backdrop of Taipei’s cityscape evokes a powerful sense of isolation and alienation inherent in contemporary life.

This sentiment is resonated in Group of Three Men, a bronze sculpture made on a much smaller scale due to the scarcity of materials in the postwar period. In this piece, three men are depicted walking in diverging directions, their paths seemingly destined never to cross. Aside from these poignant works, two other prewar pieces with solid, biomorphic forms are also featured, allowing viewers to trace how the artist’s practice and vocabulary metamorphosed amid the profound fractures in society.

The exhibition also presents works by Joan Miró and Alexander Calder. While I felt somewhat desensitized by the abundance of Miró’s prints and sculptures, I was deeply intrigued by how Calder’s mobiles liberate the traditional medium from its inherent stillness, offering a lyrical equilibrium that counters Giacometti’s monumental stasis. (iying)