Modernism Between Space and Home: An Exhibit at the Taipei City Fine Arts Museum

Albert on modernist Taiwanese art, its global connections, and the unconscious aesthetic vocabulary through which we come of age

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30). It was on an outing to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for a required class in my first year of college. The Pollock sighting was accidental: the lesson was meant to teach us about the transition from Renaissance to Baroque through paintings. Dutifully—and not without guilt, because I had slept through the entirety of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo the week prior—I tried to muster interest in painting after painting of Madonna with child. But I was bored. Much later I would come to love the Brueghels and the northern Renaissance Dutch masters, but to this day Italian Renaissance paintings leave me cold. Sorry, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

After the tour, the professor dismissed us to wander through the rest of the museum, and somehow I found myself in front of Autumn Rhythm. Something about the size of the painting, the layers of paint, and its energy snapped me awake. I spent the rest of the afternoon in …