Today in Labor History February 28, 1947: The Kuomintang government in Taiwan put down an anti-government uprising known as the February 28 Incident. They killed 28,000 civilians. And in the White Terror that followed, the government killed, imprisoned or disappeared 30,000 more. These events helped spark the Taiwanese independence movement.
I am curious about the extent to which the Dutch colonization of Taiwan in the 17th century facilitated language contact and exchange, and how it influenced the presence of Dutch loanwords (or even syntactic similarities, and language structures) in contemporary regional Sinitic languages. Are there #Taiwanese people / folks living in #Taiwan here who know some Dutch loanwords in their language(s)?
People often seem distant when they sit there with their phones, disconnected, maybe even ignorant.
What we usually don't see is what they are looking at. It's easy to forget that who seems to be under the spell of their glowing screen is sometimes just connecting to someone else, sending a short wish, showing someone they care - maybe even to make sure that they have their peace of mind to be fully there for us after they put it down.
(The man in this picture is an old Taiwanese gentleman who now works as a driver and guide to show visitors the beauty of the island. In the moment I took the picture, he texted his wife that he'll be home soon - before sharing more stories from his life with us. Only few edits, the backlight of the car, the cigarette and the phone did enough of their magic.)
Being online is a big part of our life. The average person is spending hours on social media each day, even more actively online, even more staring at screens.
While there are all kinds of smart think-pieces, essays, and books about the societal consequences of this, I think that when it comes to our own life, art is the more powerful way to engage with these issues. Like this installation at Pier 2 in Kaohsiung (高雄市) - a wonderful area to stroll around!
It's a nice piece to remind us of our smartphone use (as if that was necessary!), but its strength lies in allowing us to address it ironically, in a fun way, "performative" if you want so. There is a clear invitation to sit down next to the lady on the left, to interact with her (and be it by ignoring her), to take a picture of doing that. And thus, on another level, the art piece about using smartphones creates a reason to stop using them, to think while using them (of course to use them to capture all that!), and again to talk about it.
An art installation at Taipei101 for Lunar New Year.
(I loved and pushed the red in the sculpture itself, reduced colors in the background. I withhold from doing too much coloring apart from this, so it's not really a "cinematic" edit I would say...)