yesterday i went to the taipei fine arts museum. they had a few interesting shows. in the basement was a show of australian photography. some of these were interesting. however, i think some photoblogs out there have as good if not better work. i'm thinking in particular of .mused, chromgenic, chromasia, and daily dose of imagery. though those blogs tend to border on proffessional photography(some of them may even be proffessional, sometimes it's hard to tell with a blog).

by far my favourite thing at the museum was this show callled reflections of the seventies - taiwan explores its own reality(if you click the picture in that link you can see selections from the show). the great thing about this show was that they had some outsider art. one of the pieces is pictured above. it really lacks the details you can see in the real painting though. from a pamphlet about the show:

untutored artists of the 1970s taiwan found their support mainly from literary and art critics of the day, who discovered and endorsed self-taught artists as representative figures of the nativist style - and in so doing criticized the prevalent modernism.

the funny thing about this is i always associate naieve and outsider art with modern art movements as it's been such a big influence on many contemporary artists. but i guess in taiwan in the 70s it wasn't seen that way.