Charwei Tsai's 'Touching the Earth' at tkg+ Taipei

Charwei Tsai's exhibition 'Touching the Earth' at tkg+ in Taipei runs through 31 January. The show spans two rooms. In the first, five 2025 paintings on canvas feature pastel circles made from pigments like charoite, malachite, sodalite, and lapis lazuli, inscribed with Buddhist scripts from the 'King of Aspiration Prayers'. Three large seashells on mirrored plinths—'An Ocean of Prayers' and two 'An Ocean of Languages in a Single Syllable'—bear the same script. The second room contains a nine-minute video documenting Mongolian performance artist Ganzug Sedbazar's ritual 'Kiss the Earth' in the Mongolian grasslands. Sedbazar lights a circle of cow dung on fire, swings a smoking piece wrapped in animal skin, chants, and finally kneels to thank the earth. The room also displays turquoise-glazed ceramic vessels, some filled with goji berry, cinnamon, and peony root. The review questions whether Tsai's gestures are too hermetic and conventional to effectively convey the role of the sacred in contemporary art.