Taipei Anthology: OctoberA swollen mandolin, a prize-winning work burned for warmth, and a fog you can hear

Not fat. Volume.

118 paintings, drawings, watercolours, and sculptures by the Colombian artist Fernando Botero (1932–2023). His trademark roundness began with a mandolin he painted as a young man: he made the sound hole deliberately small, so the body of the instrument seemed to swell, and from then on people, animals, and fruit all swelled with it. The show runs through Latin America, still life, bullfights and the circus, versions of the masters and religious subjects, and sculpture, and beneath the exaggeration you can see years of studying Renaissance composition and colour.

Three hundred years of Europe in fifty paintings.

The Fubon Art Museum has borrowed more than 50 European paintings from the 16th to the 19th century from the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, arranged in six themes: how painting spoke for power and faith, how it became a window through which travellers imagined history, and how it was produced in workshops and under patronage. Rembrandt's Man in a Fur-Lined Coat, a family portrait by Frans Hals, Fragonard's Blind Man's Buff, Turner's Campo Santo in Venice, and David's Oath of the Horatii are all here. It is the first of two shows Fubon is staging with Toledo this year; the second moves from the Old Masters into the modern era.

A self-taught painter's gods, back among the gods.

Hung Tung (洪通, 1920–1987), from Nankunshen in Tainan, began painting at fifty with no formal training and became a sensation in the Taiwanese art world in the 1970s. The crowded figures, symbols, and bright colour of his pictures often bring temples and folk religion to mind. The Ministry of Culture's Mongolian and Tibetan Cultural Center now hangs his paintings beside Taoist folk artefacts, so you see his work inside the faith it grew from, and how art and religion feed each other in Taiwan's everyday culture.

A scripture written in gold.

In 1667, guided by the Grand Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang, the newly ruling Kangxi Emperor ordered a Tibetan Kangyur written in gold ink: the Dragon Kangyur (龍藏經). It took two years and helped seal the political and religious alliance between the Manchus and the Mongols. For the first time at the National Palace Museum's northern branch, it is shown complete with all its fittings: gold script on deep blue paper, cover boards painted with mandalas, layered wrappers of yellow figured satin, and five-colour curtains, alongside Ming imperial sutras and the Qianlong Kangyur, so the scripture is seen as a total work of art.

In a world bound to fall apart, what can photography still see?

The National Center of Photography and Images brings together photographers from Taiwan and France and borrows the European tradition of the vanité, once a reminder not to cling to material things, to ask how the modern ideal of endless resources and endless growth is coming apart under climate change. It is split into two shows: Territory uses microscopic images and extensive fieldwork to reveal human traces under the surface of the land (until November 2), and City looks at the gap between imagination and reality in the rush to urbanise (until November 23).

The prize-winning work ended up as firewood in winter.

Chen Chao-hua (陳肇驊, born 1990) won first prize at the Taipei Art Awards in 2023. This solo show faces what came after: the winning work, 在 下圭柔山, was burned for warmth in his freezing sheet-metal studio. Having spent years fabricating installations for other artists, he likens himself to a machine; his works use modified compressors and condensers, so machines keep running while broken and frost forms and melts again and again. By the bare last section of the show, only one question is left: caught between reality and ideals, what keeps us going?

Before closing for three years, a museum cuts itself open for you.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, 25 this year, is about to begin three years of restoration. At this moment of transition it lays out what normally stays behind the displays: museum staff juggling several jobs, artists switching between working roles, the edges of the building and the objects in it, and the systems that decide what is shown and how it is judged. Visitors walk in along a narrow corridor that follows a cross-section of the building, step by step closer to workings that are hard to see. The 14 artists and groups include the Japanese collective SIDE CORE.

Small handmade props, filmed into a whole world.

Wang Ya-hui (王雅慧, 1973–2023) won the Taipei Art Awards in 2002 with Fall (墜) and took part in the Taipei Biennial three times. Starting from close observation of everyday spaces, she used low-tech methods and handmade props to film imagined scenes that swing between reality and illusion, space and time. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum has chosen key works from every stage of her twenty-odd years of practice: video installations, kinetic sculptures, and photographs, along with studies, notebooks, sketches, and documentary films.

When the old become the majority, who carries the memories?

Taiwan and South Korea are both becoming super-aged societies. Co-organised by MoCA Taipei and the Busan Cultural Foundation, this show brings together six artists from Taiwan and Korea: one films the corners of the city where older people gather, one brings the objects and traces of care work into the gallery, one follows the migration of foreign care workers, and one looks at haenyeo diving culture in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea to see how bodily skills pass between generations. It is in MoCA Studio.

A competition that hasn't missed a year in more than four decades.

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum has held the Taipei Art Awards every year since it opened in 1983, without a break, and over four decades the award has tracked the pulse of contemporary art in Taiwan. This year's ten finalists are 耿傑生, 楊健生, 陳柏欣, 黃冠鈞, 廖昭豪, 蘇長慶, 周韋辰, 阮柏遠, 蔡昱廷, and 郭柏彥. Seen together with Chen Chao-hua's Taipei Art Awards Syndrome in the same museum, it shows both ends of one prize: the moment of being shortlisted, and what comes after winning.

Music turned into a space you can walk into.

This exhibition looks back on Ryuichi Sakamoto's (1952–2023) installation work since the 2000s: seven large installations, plus a selection from the archive of his 1999 opera LIFE. Working over many years with Shiro Takatani, Daito Manabe, Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto), Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and others, he used water, fog, weather data, and electromagnetic waves to turn sound from an art of time into something you can see and feel in space. Curated by Sachiko Namba, the show has travelled to Beijing, Chengdu, Tokyo, and Hong Kong and is now touring to Berlin and Taipei. It opens on October 31.