The Scorpion and the Frog: Masterworks from the YAGEO Foundation Collection

The Scorpion and the Frog: Masterworks from the YAGEO Foundation Collection

The exhibition brings together 66 works from the YAGEO Foundation collection, spanning the Renaissance to the present and drawing on both Eastern and Western traditions. Of these, 55 will be shown publicly in Taiwan for the first time.

The exhibition is curated by New York–based curator Philip Larratt-Smith. He is Curator of The Easton Foundation, where he oversees curatorial projects related to the artistic legacy of Louise Bourgeois. The title is taken from a Russian fable. A scorpion asks a frog to carry it across a river, but, unable to go against its nature, stings the frog midway, and both drown. The frog stands for reason and morality, while the scorpion stands for desire, fate, and human nature.Taking the fable as its central metaphor, the exhibition sets aside conventional arrangements by period, genre, or medium. Works spanning five centuries are instead presented through a series of juxtapositions, imaginary conversations across time and categories. These open onto oppositions such as sacred and profane, conscious and unconscious, realism and abstraction, and the life of the mind and the realm of the senses.

Visitors will be able to see Francis Bacon’s Study for a Pope VI shown in the same gallery as Jacopo Tintoretto’s Portrait of Cardinal Marcantonio da Mula. The two works are separated by four centuries. Tintoretto’s realist image of ecclesiastical authority stands in striking contrast to the psychological tension of Bacon’s distorted figure.

David Hockney’s celebrated double portrait Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy will also be shown in Taiwan for the first time. The couple is seated apart yet bound to one another, embodying the interplay of reason and instinct at the heart of the exhibition.

Other artists in the exhibition include Artemisia Gentileschi, Gustav Klimt, Sanyu, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Through works from different eras that illuminate one another, the exhibition invites visitors to look at art history anew and to consider the many facets of human nature.

Early-bird tickets go on sale on October 15. For full ticketing details, please visit the ticketing page on the museum’s website.