Occasionally, a dearth of “publish worthy” photos on Sunday night can mean I’m scrambling around a bit, but not this week. It can be a bit of a hassle actually, as I’m keen to embellish my rather mundane weekly musings with some visual content, yet I still insist in taking every photo at 7 mega pixels, necessitating some time to resize photos for blogging purposes. I’m ever in hope of catching that one great shot that could be enlarged to gigantic sizes; hence the original giant files sizes! This week however, I’ve had a hard time deciding which photos to include/discard as I have an embarrassment of riches.This weekend was a little bit “Groundhog Day” until Sunday. I’d had a few beers with Wal on Friday night and Cass and I bumbled around on Saturday until we went way down to the southern area of the city, a long way past the city to the environs of the National Taiwan University. The MRT delivered us quite efficiently to where we thought we wanted to go, but each successive laneway just looked less and less familiar until we realized we’d got out one stop too early! Not to be put off, we trekked along till we got to the right area, did a little bit of Taipei laneway reconnoitering and found our destination, the little restaurant, Sababba. The whole scene done there was very cool: Egyptian rolls were being prepared on the street, lots of great restaurants peeping out behind curious neon monikers like “The Hiding Cat” “Box” and the “I Swear Café”(good one for me I decided!) This city really does have wonderful street appeal: Saturday night just pulses to a very hip beat, while at the same time, it seems to accommodate all sorts, even old dags like us.
Like most weekends we’d planned to get out to the beach if possible on Sunday. Cass just loves it out in the fresh air away from the city and often comments that she doesn’t care how long I stay in the water, as she really enjoys just sitting reading her book and watching the ocean. I got a few rather pathetic waves at Pointies near Jinshan harbour, but must say that the water was just perfect, clean and a crisp temp, there was not a cloud in the sky and a light breeze blew. We’d traipsed way down to the far jetty and managed to convince ourselves we were back on Merewether beach: minus the crowd and minus the cleanliness!
The main plan for the day, however was yet to come. It was just past noon and we ventured into the hills that rise precipitously behind Jinshan town to search out the Ju Ming Museum. Ju Ming, a world renowned Taiwanese sculptor, has set out a large number of magnificent works on the hillside, nearly all megalithic in size and cast from bronze. How this could be achieved was beyond us, as some of the larger pieces were the size of a small bus. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. We wound our way unerringly upward to quite a dizzy height before we arrived. Cass had made a picnic lunch for us, so after entering, we found one of the designated eating areas and enjoyed our sangas and cans of drink while watching an amazing frenzy of feeding by plump, energetic koi, literally swimming over the top of each other to get at the special food people were feeding them. We then wandered around the park inspecting the works as we went. The metallic ones were life size and had some merit as did the “Armed Forces” series, but the subject matter left us a little lukewarm. The crowning achievements were the massive “Tai Chi series”, where exponents of Chinese martial arts were captured in bronze, their ‘gi’ easily identified and their flexibility and power clearly outlined (I noticed the flexibility in particular, when I nearly pulled a groin muscle trying to emulate one pose: more training?!). On the hill overlooking the ocean were two clever pieces: one, a life size representation of a young Ju Ming herding goats, the other, a massive ship shaped from stainless steel with scores of attending sailors in painted bronze, its skeletal hull stark against the ocean and modern cargo ships lying outside port at Keelung waiting to berth. Inside the main building, a seminal Ju Ming work in rough carved wood, of a buffalo straining to pull a cart laden with timber urged on by his peasant master was just magnificent: the feeling of colossal strength was almost palpable.
On the way back, we paused in a lovely little glass box café to have a caramel macchiato each and then strolled through an art corridor to the main building again. Inside we had the most pleasant and special surprise. We were pretty tired by this time, and nearly decided to forgo the inside area of small works, but were so glad we didn’t. There was a small number of magnificent and thought provoking works gathered for a special showing by some of the worlds leading pop artists. Andy Warhol’s “Mao” paintings, three works by Salvador Dali, including a fantastic example of his dripping clock in bronze. Henry Moore sculptures, a beautiful Joan Miró drawing and a couple of etchings by Pablo Picasso were also in the mix. What a fantastic discovery, and no wonder I spied a couple of security cameras silently panning the crowd…..
We wondered to ourselves on the way back how we’d managed not to visit this wonderful space after 6 plus years in the country and it being so close: looks there is a bit of living yet to do in this “Taipei Life”. Photos today: Cass in a “Logan’s Run” style MRT station on Saturday night, and the rest the surprising and stimulating Ju Ming Museum.