Mind Against Body: "The Scorpion and the Frog" Arrives in Taichung

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Five centuries of masterworks from the YAGEO Foundation Collection meet in a show built on dialogue, not chronology

When Taichung Art Museum opens The Scorpion and the Frog: Masterworks from the YAGEO Foundation Collection on 20 November, it will be the most comprehensive public presentation of one of Taiwan's most significant private collections. The exhibition gathers 66 works, 55 of them shown in Taiwan for the first time. Tintoretto, Artemisia Gentileschi, Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter and Jeff Koons all appear, along with Andy Warhol, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Sanyu. The show is presented in collaboration with the Taichung City Government.

David Hockney, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968), acrylic on canvas, The Scorpion and the Frog at Taichung Art Museum

David Hockney, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968, 212.1 x 303.5 cm, acrylic on canvas © David Hockney. Photo credit: Jonathan Wilkinson.

A fable as a curatorial engine

The title comes from a fable in which a scorpion asks a frog to carry it across a river. The frog fears being stung, but the scorpion argues that stinging would drown them both. Midstream, the scorpion stings anyway, because it is in its nature. Curator Philip Larratt-Smith describes the story as a bitter truth about "the fundamental incommensurability of reason and instinct," and also "a story of seduction, the ineluctability of character, and the voluptuousness of doom."

Larratt-Smith is a New York-based writer and curator who has served since 2019 as Curator of The Easton Foundation, which administers Louise Bourgeois's legacy. He curated Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2021. The fable is not decoration. It is the way he makes his framework legible to visitors, a mind-body split that he says "runs like a fault line" through the collection. It opens onto related polarities: abstraction and figuration, the sacred and the profane, the life of the mind and the realm of the senses.

Curator Philip Larratt-Smith of The Scorpion and the Frog exhibition at Taichung Art Museum

Curator Philip Larratt-Smith. Photo credit: Philip Larratt-Smith.

His method is the dialogue, “inspired in part” by the fable’s two voices. Works by artists separated by centuries and continents are placed in conversation rather than arranged as a survey. The curator says the exhibition prefers “an intuitive and imaginative logic” to a conventional narrative. The wager is that familiar icons look different when seen beside unexpected neighbours.

Three poles, and the artists in between

The checklist falls into three loose groupings.

The cerebral and the transcendent. Spiritual contemplation, metaphysical inquiry and conceptual rigour run through works by Artemisia Gentileschi, Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter and Hiroshi Sugimoto. These pieces approach the mind-body question from the side of intellect and stillness.

The body as a site of desire. Louise Bourgeois, Gustav Klimt and David Hockney foreground the human figure in states of longing, reflection, transformation and exposure. Here the body is vulnerable, intimate and psychologically charged.

The mediators. Warhol, Koons, Picasso and Sanyu sit between the poles. Through abstraction, repetition, stylization and artifice, they turn familiar images and objects into meditations on identity, desire, history and perception. Their work refuses the choice between thinking and feeling.

Highlights to look for

Tintoretto and Bacon: the Church, then its undoing. The exhibition pairs Jacopo Tintoretto’s Portrait of Cardinal Marcantonio da Mula (1562–63) with Francis Bacon’s Study for a Pope VI (1961). Tintoretto gives the cardinal dignity, institutional authority and a psychologically nuanced presence. Bacon’s distorted pope dissolves those same signs of authority into an image of vulnerability and instinct. Placed together, the two portraits show a gap between the social and spiritual order that a figure represents and the desire and existential dread that can sit beneath it. The Bacon is one of the key works of his Pope series and has been shown at Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Yale Center for British Art and the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

Jacopo Tintoretto, Portrait of Cardinal Marcantonio da Mula, circa 1562-63, oil on canvas, YAGEO Foundation Collection

Jacopo Tintoretto, Portrait of Cardinal Marcantonio da Mula, circa 1562-63, 185 x 101.5 cm, framed 211 x 127 x 10 cm, oil on canvas.

Francis Bacon, Study for a Pope VI (1961), oil on canvas, The Scorpion and the Frog at Taichung Art Museum

Hockney’s double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy. Making its public debut in Taiwan, this classically composed painting shows the writer Christopher Isherwood and his long-time partner Don Bachardy seated apart in a domestic interior, “both alone and together.” It belongs to Hockney’s celebrated series of double portraits and is, in the exhibition’s phrasing, less a depiction of two individuals than a portrait of a relationship. Bachardy looks out at the viewer while Isherwood looks at Bachardy, the younger man and the object of his desire. Hockney died earlier this year, so the painting will inevitably also be read as a tribute to him.

Coorte, Schiele and Koons: a three-way in red. Larratt-Smith singles out one of the first dialogues he conceived, linking Adriaen Coorte’s Still Life of a Porcelain Bowl with Wild Strawberries, Egon Schiele’s Gebeugter Akt and Koons’s Balloon Dog. It spans painting, drawing and sculpture, and the early 18th century to the end of the 20th. The thread is the colour red, which does different work in each piece. Coorte’s strawberries, at varying stages of ripeness, stand for transience and the urge to seize fleeting pleasure. Koons’s flawlessly polished surface reflects the viewer in a funhouse distortion, and the curator reads a psychosexual undercurrent in its seemingly innocent form. Schiele’s contorted, erotic figure concentrates the same red into flesh. What starts as a still life becomes a meditation on time, pleasure, tension and mortality.

Why it matters

Taiwan’s private collections are rarely seen at this scale, so the exhibition is a chance to meet a major Taiwanese collection in public. YAGEO Foundation calls it a “significant milestone in promoting public engagement with fine art.” Larratt-Smith says the checklist was chosen purely for fit with the concept. That it came out largely new to Taiwanese audiences was a by-product, not a goal. Taichung Director Yi-Hsin Lai says the museum is committed to serving as “a platform for cross-disciplinary artistic exchange.”

The exhibition’s quieter argument is that the great themes of art history, “love, sex, death, beauty, fame, and the role of the artist,” do not belong to any one period or tradition. By declining to tell a single story, the show invites visitors to move between opposed ideas, as the scorpion and the frog cannot.