Who is Taiwanese?
Taiwan’s minority indigenous peoples are being used to refute mainland China’s claims on the island – but what does that mean for their recognition, land rights and identity?October 2011
Arts & Letters
Popular music masterpiece
Sarah Blasko - ‘As Day Follows Night’, 2009
Bookended by two wispy Disney-esque ballads, As Day Follows Night has as its body, and certainly its heart, ten beautiful songs. Their melodic strength is the major surprise, given that Sarah Blasko, who penned all songs on the record, worked with a co-writer on her previous two albums. Lyrically she was always strong, if obscure and consciously poetic. Here all pretence is dropped, as a sign of artistic maturity and in the face of having to detail a broken romance – a subject matter she takes way beyond the clichés of a ‘break-up album’. Her songs are magnificently supported by the woody, percussive, fairytale production of Stockholm’s Bjorn Yttling, and she sings magnificently. The choice of Yttling is proof that great artists often make inspired decisions when it comes to collaborators. What is remarkable, re-visiting the album two years on, is the clipped intensity that Blasko brings to her chronicle of a failed relationship; a romance that, given all its human pleasures and problems, in the end must bow (as the singer comes to see) to the laws of nature, the cosmic order, where day always follows the ending of night.
—Robert Forster
Tacita Dean and the poetics of film editing
The MCA’s survey of the British-born artist’s work reveals both the luminosity of analogue film and its precariousness
David McBride’s guilty plea and the need for whistleblower reform
The former army lawyer had no choice but to plead guilty, which goes to show how desperately we need better whistleblower protections
Mars attracts
Reviving the Viking mission’s experiments may yet find life as we know it on Mars, but the best outcome would be something truly alien
![Emily Kam Kngwarray, Anmatyerr people, not titled [detail], 1981](https://www.themonthly.com.au/sites/default/files/styles/frontpage_small_2x/public/Sprague_1223_1140x700.jpg?itok=-odjcVyx "Emily Kam Kngwarray, Anmatyerr people, not titled [detail], 1981")
A clear view: Emily Kam Kngwarray at the NGA
A major exhibition of the late Anmatyerr desert painter is welcome, but the influence of the rapacious art market on Aboriginal art is inescapable
The rule of threes: NGV Triennial
The sprawling show’s exploration of technologies and pressing politics takes in artificial intelligence and deep-fake photojournalism
Animal form: Sigrid Nunez
The celebrated American author’s latest book, ‘The Vulnerables’, completes a loose trilogy of hybrid autobiographical and fictional novels
A house provided: Preserving public housing
The architectural practice proving that refurbishing public housing can be less expensive and disruptive than demolition for new projects
Tacita Dean and the poetics of film editing
The MCA’s survey of the British-born artist’s work reveals both the luminosity of analogue film and its precariousnessDavid McBride’s guilty plea and the need for whistleblower reform
The former army lawyer had no choice but to plead guilty, which goes to show how desperately we need better whistleblower protections
Kandinsky at AGNSW
The exhibition of the Russian painter’s work at the Art Gallery of NSW provides a fascinating view of 20th-century art’s leap from representation to abstraction
The unsung career of Margret RoadKnight
Little-known outside the Melbourne folk scene for decades, singer Margret RoadKnight’s 60 years of music-making is celebrated in a new compilation