Between Instinct and Eternity ----- At Taichung Art Museum, The Scorpion and the Frog brings five centuries of art into a charged conversation on desire, power, spirituality and the body
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（From left to right: David Hockney’s work on view in the exhibition, exterior of Taichung City Art Museum, Pierre Chen）
A Fault Line Through Art History
What happens when a Renaissance cardinal meets a twentieth-century pope stripped of certainty? When Rothko’s fields of contemplation share a room with the psychological intensity of Louise Bourgeois, or when the cool architecture of a Hockney double portrait is placed against art driven by longing, vulnerability and desire?
Opening at Taichung Art Museum on 20 November 2026, The Scorpion and the Frog: Masterworks from the YAGEO Foundation Collection approaches art history not as a chronology, but as a field of tensions. Bringing together 66 works—55 shown in Taiwan for the first time—the exhibition moves across five centuries, from Renaissance portraiture to modern and contemporary art, drawing artists of radically different periods and geographies into unexpected proximity.
Curated by New York-based writer and curator Philip Larratt-Smith, the exhibition takes the ancient opposition between mind and body as its conceptual pulse. Larratt-Smith describes this division as a “fault line” running through the YAGEO Foundation Collection, opening onto other dualities: abstraction and figuration, sacred and profane, intellect and sensation. Rather than resolving these oppositions, the exhibition allows them to remain alive—sometimes seductive, sometimes unsettling.
Its title comes from The Scorpion and the Frog, a fable in which instinct ultimately overwhelms reason. Here, the story becomes less an illustration than a curatorial atmosphere. The visitor moves between restraint and impulse, transcendence and flesh, encountering art as a record of the contradictions human beings have never quite escaped.
Power, Desire and the Unquiet Portrait
At the heart of the exhibition is an extraordinary confrontation between Jacopo Tintoretto’s Portrait of Cardinal Marcantonio da Mula (1562–63) and Francis Bacon’s Study for a Pope VI (1961). Separated by four centuries, the two paintings speak almost uncannily to one another.
Tintoretto constructs authority through presence: the cardinal appears dignified, psychologically alert and inseparable from the institutional power of the Church. Bacon takes the visual language of papal authority and destabilises it. In Study for a Pope VI—one of the significant works from his celebrated Pope series—the figure seems caught between throne and void, status and exposure. The symbols of spiritual command remain, yet certainty has fractured. Seen together, the works turn portraiture into a theatre in which power is built, inhabited and finally made vulnerable.
A quieter form of psychological tension emerges in David Hockney’s double portrait of writer Christopher Isherwood and his long-time partner Don Bachardy, presented publicly in Taiwan for the first time. The composition is outwardly composed, almost classical: two men seated within a domestic interior. Yet the emotional geometry is more complex. Bachardy looks toward the viewer; Isherwood looks toward Bachardy. They occupy the same room but remain distinct, creating a portrait not simply of two individuals, but of the invisible space between them—the architecture of intimacy itself.
This oscillation between exterior appearance and interior life runs throughout the exhibition. The body is never merely represented; it becomes a vessel for longing, mortality, eroticism, memory and psychological exposure.
Where the Sacred Meets the Sensual
Around these central encounters, the YAGEO Foundation Collection unfolds as a constellation rather than a survey. Artemisia Gentileschi, Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter and Hiroshi Sugimoto open paths toward spiritual contemplation, metaphysical inquiry and conceptual rigour. Their works suggest that abstraction and stillness can become ways of approaching what cannot easily be named.
Elsewhere, Louise Bourgeois, Gustav Klimt and Hockney return attention to the body—to intimacy, vulnerability, transformation and desire. The sensual and the cerebral do not remain neatly separated. Artists including Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Pablo Picasso and Sanyu complicate the division further, using repetition, stylisation, abstraction and artifice to turn familiar bodies and objects into questions of identity, perception and history.
The result is less a lesson in canonical art history than an invitation to look across it. A work made centuries ago can suddenly feel psychologically contemporary; a modern image can acquire the gravity of an icon. Meaning emerges in the interval between objects, in the visual and emotional echoes that occur when one artwork is allowed to disturb another.
For Taichung Art Museum, itself conceived as an open and cross-disciplinary cultural space, the exhibition also signals an ambitious moment of international exchange. Organised by the Taichung City Government and YAGEO Foundation, it is the Foundation’s most comprehensive presentation of its collection in Taiwan to date.
The Scorpion and the Frog ultimately proposes that the history of art may be read through the forces that continue to divide—and define—human experience. Reason confronts instinct. Spirit encounters flesh. Authority gives way to fragility. Across centuries, the artists gathered here do not offer reconciliation so much as recognition: beneath changing styles, cultures and eras, the essential tensions remain.
And perhaps that is why the fable endures. We cross the river believing ourselves governed by reason, while art quietly reminds us of everything that moves beneath the surface.
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
The Scorpion and the Frog: Masterworks from the YAGEO Foundation Collection
20 November 2026 – 4 April 2027
Exhibition Rooms D and E, Taichung Art Museum
No. 2201, Zhongke Rd., Xitun Dist., Taichung City, Taiwan
Tuesday–Sunday 9:00–17:00; Saturday 9:00–20:00; open on national holidays
