"Smile, Summer! Youth Illustration and Design," an exhibition recently opened at Taichung Cultural and Creative Industries Park, takes a unique approach to exploring concepts of framing.
“Virtual reality and the imaginative world are perfectly intertwined in this event, as if the audience could actually walk into the artists’ work,” said Chen Chao-jung, secretary-general of the Bureau of Cultural Heritage under the Ministry of Culture, which co-organized the show by eight local illustrators with Taiwan Design Center.
A special feature of the exhibition is that it gives the artists a chance to demonstrate how digitized their business models are while displaying their artistic creativity.
One illustrator, YenYen, shows how she has parlayed endorsement by Mandopop celebrity Crowd Lu and renowned designer Nieh Yung-chen into a formidable Internet presence, with more than 370,000 fans on social media sites.
Lee Ming-fu, aka afu, has also translated marketing savvy into a sophisticated Internet-based brand. He started by penning a blog under the now closed social network wretch. He now uses Facebook and adds at least three articles per week to maintain a loyal, 200,000-strong fan base.
Lin Yen-liang, aka Banana Lin, established his personal brand while still at university, and went a step further in 2012 to become the only one of the eight to sign a development contract with an agent.
To help commercialize the works, the bureau has introduced a youth marketplace to give the artists more public exposure and access to culture-oriented businesses interested in exploring spinoffs from their material. (SSC-SDH)
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