Visual arts are closely intertwined with Taiwanese history. For evidence, look no further than the National Palace Museum in Taipei, a repository of nearly 700,000 artworks and artifacts from the Chinese mainland. (Most famously, a jadeite carving of bok choy and a tantalizing meat-shaped stone from the Ching dynasty of 1644-1912).
Spanning eight millennia, these treasures have made long and perilous journeys from Beijing, evading both the Japanese Imperial Army and Chinese civil war. The collection has often been a point of contention in cross-strait relations, and with the unification-averse President Lai Ching-te now in power, Taiwan seems unlikely to concede to the Chinese claim that it rightfully belongs to them anytime soon.
If you venture beyond the National Palace Museum, however, Taiwan reveals a dynamic creative scene that appears more focused on a globalized future than the past. Recent headlines from the Taiwanese art world announced the Renzo Piano-designed Fubon Art Museum, opened in Taipei this May, and “Capturing the Moment,” a joint exhibition of photography and painting from the collections of Tate Modern and Taiwan’s Yageo Foundation, showing at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (KMFA) until Nov. 17. Taiwan also now hosts a number of international contemporary art events, such as Tokyo Gendai’s sister fair Taipei Dangdai. Eric Hao-Yuan Weng, director of the art PR firm Studio Weng, estimates there are 200 to 300 art galleries in Taiwan (roughly half in Taipei), and that some 60% focus on modern or contemporary art. This cultural vibrancy likely owes to many factors, among them greater expressive freedom than in previous generations and the rise of a creative class in the wake of the country’s semiconductor-led tech boom, but it is an energy that has been building for decades.