What to know | The Scorpion and the Frog at Taichung Art Museum: 66 Works, 20 Dialogues

The Taichung Art Museum will hold "The Scorpion and the Frog: YAGEO Foundation Collection Exhibition" from November 20, 2026 to April 4, 2027, displaying 66 works by 34 artists, 55 of which will be publicly unveiled in Taiwan for the first time. The exhibition is co-organized by the Taichung City Government and the YAGEO Foundation and curated by Philip Larratt-Smith. It uses 20 groups of works to dialogue with each other and rearrange the viewing relationship between different eras and media.

Cover image: © David Hockney. Photo credit: Jonathan Wilkinson.

How does the fable of the scorpion and the frog become a curatorial method?

The title of the exhibition comes from the fable of crossing the river, using the relationship between reason, instinct, body and mind as a clue for thinking. The exhibition space is not only arranged according to the artist's birth year, but through the juxtaposition of works, the seemingly far-off paintings and sculptures respond to each other.

For the audience, they can first find common elements between the same group of works, such as character postures, color blocks or space, and then read the text description. In this way, you can first establish your own viewing and then understand the curator's arrangements, without turning admission into a test to see if you can remember all the artist's names.

Four centuries of portraits, placed in the same space

Francis Bacon's "Study for a Pope VI" from 1961 is juxtaposed with Tintoretto's "Portrait of Cardinal Marcantonio da Mula" from 1562 to 1563. Both works involve authoritative figures, but they are expressed in different ways: one uses transformation and psychological tension to form the figure, while the other retains a more concrete portrait.

The exhibition also allows the works of Sanyu and Mark Rothko to reflect each other in terms of color and horizontal divisions, and also places Gerhard Richter's family images and Louise Bourgeois' "Spider" in the same viewing relationship. The different ages and materials of the works do not prevent the audience from finding connections between form and memory.

Hockney, Warhol and Koons, what else can we see besides masterpieces?

David Hockney's "Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy" is exhibited in Taiwan for the first time, making the position and distance in the double portrait the focus of observation. Works such as Andy Warhol's self-portraits and Jeff Koons's "Balloon Dog (Red)" provide different relationships between public images, daily objects and viewers.

When looking at the names of these familiar works, you might as well pay attention to the actual scale, surface, and distance from the adjacent works. Online pictures often present objects independently, but the position and movement of the body in the exhibition may change your understanding of the same work.

How to distinguish between early bird tickets and weekend reservations?

The announced early bird ticket period is from 9 a.m. on October 15 to 4:30 p.m. on November 19. The ticket price is NT$200, the original price is NT$300. For weekend reservation time tickets, you can first select the exhibition period and queue up according to the priority channel; non-reservation tickets are arranged according to the general channel and on-site. Reservation should not be understood as completely skipping the queue.

The exhibition venue is located in Galleries D and E at Taichung Art Museum.Official ticketing platformCheck the ticket type, applicable date and opening hours of the day. If you mainly want to see the dialogue between the works, it is recommended to reserve the time to compare back and forth in front of the same group of works; the number of 66 works provides scale, and what truly constitutes this exhibition is how they are viewed together.