The much-beloved, floating Yellow Duck Sculpture by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman has burst again in the harbor of Taiwan’s northern port city of Keelung.  This is the second time the duck has burst in Taiwan, and may have been ruptured by eagles, which were reportedly attacking the sculpture.  “We want to apologize to the fans of the yellow rubber duck….the weather is fine today and we haven’t found the cause of the problem. We will carefully examine the duck to determine the cause,” organizer Huang Jing-tai told reporters. (more…)

The Guggenheim Museum has received a $10 million grant from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation in Hong Kong to comission new works from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.  The move comes as the museum continues to expand its global view of contemporary art.  “This is all part of our global narrative,” says Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. “For years people have asked what we are doing about China. This is a crucial next step.” (more…)

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Ai Weiwei, Forever Bicycles (2012). All photos via Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Ai Weiwei’s current exhibition and semi-retrospective at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Ai Weiwei, Absent, includes pieces dating back to 1983, including large-scale sculpture and a collection of 100 photographs divided into his two artistic phases—in the East Village, New York and in Beijing, China. “Whenever Ai had a spare moment he would fill it with pictures of the places he visited, people he met, the area he lived,” states the exhibition’s press release. This lends a feeling of immediacy and voyeurism to Ai’s photos, as the viewer is shown a glimpse of the artist’s life as he documents the lives of others.

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Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan (1994)

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