Chinese Adam is poised at the moment of choice in Kuo Wei-kuo’s throwback to Eden, “Rose, Rose! I Love You” (2007). The oil on canvas is among a series at Lin & Keng’s Gallery that probe societal decay

There won't be another painter like Millet, but whatever ineffable gravity that's

got the public queued round the block this month to glimpse "The Angelus" is well on its way in the homespun art scene, where the ground at Art Taipei 2008 is breaking and bearing forth works that pick at the nerves and ask their own questions.

Art Taipei, a fourteen-year old exhibition, opens today at World Trade Center.

The Elsa Gallery (B07) presents Chang Chen-win's "Taiwanese Superwoman": a bombshell in g-string and stilettos. We don't see her face, as it's the figure that counts. This latter-day femme fatale stands tall, facing a brood of slouchy, aging roadside security guards.

Another, the Lin & Keng Gallery (B03), is home to Kuo Wei-kuo's "Rose, Rose! I Love You." Ostensibly, the night scene limns Paradise Lost. But his version is chilling. The couple is laid slackly in loose symmetry, opposing a pale purple rose in full bloom. Eve, fitted with the head of a gorilla, bares her mandibles at her mate and pinches a flaccid blue balloon, the length of it phallic against a claw-like hand. A glass pitcher angled on uneven ground is set to spill against an apple minus only one bite, and Adam, beer-bellied and markedly Chinese, fixes his gaze beyond the canvas into the face of the viewer.

The same man reappears in "Carp Knows My Heart" and "Man of Desire's Domain," and again, the privilege of appraisal lies squarely in the depicted character's hand; the viewer squirms or walks away as he chooses.

New artists, too, are snapping their chops into the quick of society.

In Ho Meng-chuan's "This New Year's Eve We Signed the Peace Treaty," Ho as Snow White issues a pinky-promise to Ho the Uptown Girl, while handed a gun by Ho the Seductress, as Ho the Office Worker kicks back in her pantyhose, too occupied to care.

Ho costumes up for every role in her digital prints, which run along the "Snow White," "I Got Super Strong Courage," and "Artificial Fur" series. The reappearance of her face needles at the real and the unreal roles demanded by the etiquette, education, and relics of contemporary society.

The "Made in Taiwan -- Young Artists Discovery" (MIT) exhibit features Ho and seven other emerging artists under 35 years of age.

"These are the up-and-coming," said Huang Tsai-lang, Minister of the Council of Cultural Affairs, "The competition they faced was fierce."

Continued Huang, the eight were selected through multiple review among a total of 108 applicants.

The singular Rose Huang, who also landed a booth in MIT, crafts pets -- "Pokie," "Aki," "Lulu," "Tita," and "Apple" -- from corrugated cardboard. One imagines these are dogs, though on this point there's quite a bit of latitude. Molded with ridges and bumps but no faces, the pups are more like chairs, or patch reefs.

At any rate, the bumps exude personality. The question of "how" is something Huang senses with surety: "...the loneliness of pets actually projects one's innermost feeling on loneliness," as the "lovability of pets actually projects one's intrinsic innocence." On the other hand, precisely why your coral of choice occurs as an anal-regressive, obsessive-compulsive neurotic is a matter for private meditation.

Other emerging artists featured are Yi-chih Lai, Fang-yi Chu, Pei-yu Lai, Geng-zhen Wu, En-tzu Chang, and Chien-jen Chiu.

Exhibit 1 of the World Trade Center is host until Tuesday, September 2 to 111 art galleries across the globe. Around 60 hail from the island proper and are represented in five of the seven exhibition categories.