There are a few key factors to the resurrection of the picnic in modern times: First comes a yearning to commune with nature. Second, people are aspiring to establish closer bonds with other people. And third, food safety scandals are pushing people to prepare their own food. Picnics and lawns are virtually joined at the hip: witness the picnic depicted in one of Edouard Manet’s most famous works, The Luncheon on the Grass. The event that first brought the international picnic mania to Taiwan also started on a lawn, in Taipei. In the months and years that have followed, many important picnicking events have taken place on grassy expanses throughout Taiwan. Consequently, perhaps it can be said that picnics provide the most direct and easiest method of getting closer to nature.
This issue also contains an exclusive interview with Legend Lin Dance Theatre’s Lin Lee-chen. She has spent 20 years choreographing three important dances. Her “aesthetic of pace and space” forces audiences to reconsider the meaning of “pace.” Another interesting story is on the pianist Rueibin Chen, who now lives in Austria. In this nostalgic piece readers can gain a sense of how great artists must pay a high price for their chosen paths in life, including, in Chen’s case, many years of loneliness.
Amid the passionate heat of summer, we’re sure that two articles about young people and shoes will ratchet up the passion still further. Yang Yu-jen and Mimi Chen use different methods to provide poor children around the world with shoes that protect their well-being. How do they do it? Don’t miss those in-depth reports.
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