Incongruity reigns at the headquarters building of the Chi Mei Corp., one of Taiwan's largest petro-chemical manufacturers. The severe, clean lines of the company's box-like headquarters building in suburban Tainan draws on typical International Style architecture. To the rear of the seven-story building are large, spherical holding tanks for gas and other chemicals. But it is the garden fronting the building that catches the most attention. Four glistening white neoclassical statues personifying the seasons surround a center urn and pedestal graced with angels and nymphs, They indicate that this is a business with a difference. Inside, on the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors, sandwiched between corporation executives, chemical engineers, and salesmen, is the company funded Chi Mei Culture Foundation.
This arts and cultural foundation strives to develop community appreciation of the arts. “The goal of the foundation from the very beginning has been' public service,” says founder and Chi Mei Corp. President Hsu Wen-lung (許文龍). “Its aim is to provide a better cultural life for the general public. A long-time lover of the arts, Hsu started the foundation in 1977, committing 10 percent of the company's annual profits as its budget, an average of NT$200 million (US$7.7 million). The foundation focuses its promotional efforts on Tainan city and county, sponsoring public and private cultural activities, providing scholarships, and donating funds to purchase books for schools and community libraries.
The foundation's first project – the Tainan Municipal Wax Museum – reflected its interest in establishing a strong relationship with the surrounding community. The museum, built in 1981 in the city's historical Anping district, houses a permanent display on Taiwan history, But since then, the Chi Mei Foundation has expanded its perspective far beyond Tainan, by introducing and promoting Western fine arts among the local populace. In 1986 and 1987, the foundation sponsored the Tainan Opera Orchestra, which performed music from many classical Western operas. In 1992, it established an art museum focusing on European paintings and Western musical Instruments. And in the past few years, much of the foundation's effort has been geared toward sponsoring students and performers of art and music.
Company Vice President Chu Yu-tang (朱玉堂), who has been involved in managing the foundation since it began, attributes the recent emphasis on scholarships to its founder's own youthful dreams. Hsu studied violin in high school and later learned to paint, but he didn't have the money to pursue any consistent artistic training. “Now that he has succeeded as a businessman,” Chu says, “he tries to fulfill his own dream by giving young people in the local communities the support to pursue their dreams.”
In 1988, the Chi Mei Young Artist Scholarships began providing awards totaling NT$5 million (US$190,000) to support fifteen to twenty students in their study of art or music, either Taiwan or abroad. “There are many youngsters who have the talent, but lack the money for training,” Chu says. “We want to provide them with the financial support they need.” Recipients can study. Western painting or sculpture, composing, piano, stringed instruments, wind instruments, or vocal training. They are under no obligation but to polish their skills. Each scholarship is worth NT$240,000 (US$9,000). Several of the recipients have already gone on to promising careers. Twenty-two-year old pianist Chen Yu-hsiang (陳毓襄), who received a Chi Mei scholarship while studying at the Juilliard School in New York, was a prize winner at the Ninth Tchaikovsky Musiic International in 1990.
The good earth has many facets – This pastoral French scene is a long way from Tainan's rice field culture.
The foundation also sponsors a program that loans superior-quality stringed instruments to musicians on a one-year basis. “Some local musicians who are very gifted could do better in international contests if they had better instruments,” Chu says. “That's why we buy top-grade violins and loan them to musicians.” The loans, which began in 1990, are free of charge. The current collection of twenty instruments includes two eighteenth-century Stradivarius violins. One of these has been loaned to Taiwanese violinist Su Hsien-ta (蘇顯達) and Chinese-American Lin Chao-liang (林昭亮), both of international repute.
Another of the foundation's major projects is the Chi Mei Art Institute, which was established in 1990. The institute includes a museum collection of art works and antique musical instruments. The museum, which is generally open only on Sundays and holidays, attracts an average of two thousand visitors a week.
Hsu established the museum to fill what he saw as a void in Taiwan. Despite a population of 21 million people and a per capita GNP of more than US$10,000, he laments, the island has only a few museums. “Our kids don't have anything to see. They have to go abroad to see the real thing,” Hsu says. “That's why I wanted to set up this art institute. I don't regard the things I collect as mine. I intend them to become part of the teaching materials for our art education.”
The museum, which opened in 1992, set out collecting-Western paintings, sculptures, musical instruments, and other artifacts. Hsu has followed a largely Western orientation because he thinks there is a lack of any similar collection in Taiwan. “As a private-sector organization, what we can do is make up what's missing,” he says. “I don't think we can do better than the Palace Museum in showing the essence of Chinese culture. So we focus on Western artwork.”
But the institute also makes it a rule that if the purchasing staff stumbles on an impressive Chinese work at an auction, it can offer a bid. One recent acquisition is a set of wooden Chinese screens bought in Paris. These are carved with a lengthy congratulation to Ching dynasty Emperor Kanghsi on his birthday in 1679. Vice President Chu, who is on the purchasing committee, is also arranging to buy two' seventeenth-century Chinese cannons through a London broker. The cannons, designed and built by Ferdinandus Verbiest, a Belgian missionary who became an advisor to Emperor Kanghsi, were taken from China by foreigners after the Boxer Rebellion in the late Ching dynasty. Chu says the cannons recently turned up in Australia.
An exhibit at the cutting edge of popular interest – Hsu knows that many people, especially men and children, are more interested in weapons than watercolors.
With its generous budget, the institute is able to build its collection quickly. Last year, it spent NT$200 million (US$7.7 million) on acquisitions. “This is rather sizable compared with the annual budget for the major government museums,” Chu says. By comparison, the 1993 budget for the Taipei Fine Arts Museum was NT$100 million, which covered not only acquisitions, but all administrative expenses. So far, the institute has collected about three hundred paintings and sculptures, twenty violins and fifty other antique musical instruments, and four hundred antique weapons. In addition, the institute has 150 animal samples to be displayed in a separate natural science museum, which is still being planned.
The art collection dates from the Renaissance to the twentieth century and includes oil pantings, watercolors, drawings, and marble, bronze, and terracotta sculptures. The artists represented include the sixteenth-century Italian painter Giovanni Redrini, nineteenth-century British artist Thomas Cooper Gotch, and twentieth-century French painter Georges Rouault. The sculpture collection includes modern works by Rodin and the Russian cubist Alexander Archipenko. In the musical instrument collection are eighteenth-century,violins by Antonius Stradivarius as well as Joseph Guarneri del Gesu.
In February, the institute highlighted its antique weapons,collection in a special exhibition featuring a newly acquired Mongolian warrior's battle dress. The outfit, which includes helmet, armor, and matching dress for the battle horse, is one of only four existing sets in the world. Also in the exhibition were fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European guns, pistols, swords, knives, arrows, spears, and armor. “This antique weapons exhibition is probably the first such one of any size, in Taiwan,” museum curator Pan Yuan-shih (潘元石) says. “The viewers-just kept pouring in.”
Part of the foundation's collection of antique musical instruments – Some are loaned out for use by promising young musicians.
The institute's collection is quickly outgrowing the limited exhibition space in the company's headquarters building. “The gallery now looks saturated, and we still have lots of things in storage boxes,” Pan says. “We never intended to open the art institute in the building, because we realized it wasn't big enough for both display and storage.” What they had in mind has a much larger place in downtown Tainan, but that plan ran into trouble.
The original idea was to purchase land from the Taiwan Sugar Research Institute (TSRI) and set up the museum there. But the government-owned Taiwan Sugar Corp., which runs the TSRI, was afraid its 90-year-old institute would have to shrink in size, which could hurt Taiwan's sugar industry. The two sides could not reach a consensus, even with the municipal government as a mediator, and the plan was aborted.
The foundation later approached the city government with a proposal for a fifteen-year reconstruction plan that would turn the city's old government buildings into an art museum, history museum, concert hall, and library. But this plan, too, encountered obstacles. “People in that part of town prefer making the area into a business district, not a district for preserving cultural heritage,” Chu says. “They want the land prices to soar.” The directors of Tainan Municipal Cultural Center also voiced disagreement, saying the old municipal building had already been designated for a museum of Taiwan and Mainland Chinese literary materials from 1919 to the present, a project administered by the central government's Council for Cultural Planning and Development (CCPD).
The institute has, for now, given up the hope of acquiring land through a government donation, and Hsu is disappointed with official priorities. He doesn't think the proposed museum of modern literary materials, which would focus initially only on the Salt Belt area of Tainan's southern coast, is more urgent than setting up an art museum that appeals to the interests of more people. “That is another institute that does not have a direct relation to the public,” he says of the literary museum.
The CCPD, however, defends its project. “Chi Mei was quite aggressive in trying to win over the buildings and the land,” says one council staff member who is from Tainan. “But their original proposal was pretty rough.” She also questions whether the foundation has done proper documentation of its collection. “I'm not saying what they do is not important,” she says, “But what we do is at least as important. And with their money, they can buy land anywhere. We don't have that kind of money.” This year, the foundation finally started constructing its own eight-floor, 14,000-square-foot building for the art institute on company land.
Chi Mei does not intend to compete with the National Palace Museum, but it always keeps alert for good example of chinoiserie or Chinese objets d'art.
Hsu also foresees problems in finding support for another of the foundation's planned projects – transplanting an entire street from the traditional city of Xiamen (Amoy), in Mainland China, to Tainan. Curator Pan says the idea came from a similar project in Inuyama, Japan, in which a Japanese village from the Meiji period (1868-1912) has been preserved. Buildings, traditional clothing, books, and folk art can be seen in their original surroundings.
In the same way, the foundation hopes to recapture something,of the island's past. “The old Taiwan has been disappearing rapidly, and Tainan, the oldest city, is only left with a few, scattered relics,” Pan says. “We discovered that the way Xiamen is today is almost the same as old Tainan about half a century ago. We wish to preserve that and make it a tool for teaching the architectural history of Taiwan.”
Pan has signed a contract with Xiamen University, which will help compile documents, conduct field investigations, develop construction blueprints, and oversee the dismantling of the street. The project is now under review by the Architecture Department of National Cheng Kung University in,Tainan, which would be involved in the reconstruction. “We're again searching for a suitable location and we expect difficulties,” Pan says, “but we want to try.”
Some of the foundation's projects have at times drawn criticisms. People say the foundation is only out to earn more money. But Hsu quickly defends his brainchild. “This is a non-profit organization,” he insists, “We don't do charity, but we don't seek to make money, either.” He also defends his own intentions: “I just want to repay the public for what they have brought me. I've made It in this society. My friends, colleagues, and clients have all contributed to my success. I think I should return the favor.”