Taiwan Today

Reassessing over a century of nativist art offers a framework for contemporary acceptance of diverse cultural identities.
 

In March 2025 Minister of Culture Li Yuan (李遠‬) spoke at the opening ceremony for the preparatory office for the National Museum of Modern Art Tainan (MOMA Tainan), which is to be established within the southern city’s municipal Tainan Art Museum (TAM). “No matter what we call our country, we have a unique ­character. The dark clouds that once hung over Taiwan have dispersed,” he said, ­nodding to the country’s complex past and ­present even as he welcomed progress toward the emergence of a ­distinct, confident national cultural ­selfhood through the 2018 Reconstruction of Taiwan Art History Project (RTAHP). The ­project, devised by the Ministry of Culture (MOC), is a tool to recover and render accessible lost and overshadowed ­tangible culture that contributes to a unique Taiwan identity.

In 2017 New Taipei City-based National Taiwan University of the Arts (NTUA) helped organize a National Cultural Congress, held in neighboring Taipei City, which called for a domestic cultural renaissance. The RTAHP was born the following year as part of a ­comprehensive initiative addressing key infrastructure needs for the next three ­decades. The project was designed to ­retrieve missing, overlooked, incomplete and vulnerable aspects of domestic art history and was the first publicly funded national-level program investigating and documenting the country’s own art ­history, often previously subsumed by ­international art mores.

The policy yielded results ranging from the “Dictionary of Taiwanese Art History,” a collection of 200 ­entries spanning the mid-17th century to the ­present, to a book focused solely on Hsiao ­Jen-cheng (蕭仁徵), a lesser-known artist who in the late 1940s moved from China to Taiwan, where he ­pioneered modern ink painting. To uncover and trace the path of Taiwan’s art, which includes elements of Japanese, Chinese, Western and Austronesian ­cultures, RTAHP organized forums, exhibitions and workshops around the country. Li also mentioned that many private collectors have bequeathed their estates to the government, citing the 2019 donation of more than 600 paintings by the Sun Ten Museum in California, including those of Chen Jin (陳進), a winner of the inaugural 1927 Taiwan Art Exhibition and the first female ­artist from Taiwan to study in Japan. These portfolios that date back over a century are now part of the ­collection at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in the central city of Taichung, and Li noted with delight that another national art museum will be needed to house and display the research and work coming to light from RTAHP, which just ­entered a second phase that is scheduled to ­continue until 2028.

Restoring Views

RTAHP collected 867 works of art, as well as over 100,000 documents and audiovisual sources between 2018 and 2023. During the same period more than 8,000 artifacts and historical materials were carefully restored. The project also resulted in numerous publications, ­exhibitions and performances designed to shine a spotlight on local practice spanning fine art, craft, literature and music. RTAHP 2.0 continues work in these fields and has even expanded to cover ­architecture and Taiwanese opera, while the prospective MOMA Tainan forms a crucial part of the burgeoning project. The preparatory office’s opening was attended by artists’ descendants, who signed memorandums of understanding to ­donate family collections to the museum. “There is a sense of urgency to conserve these works so they can be maintained in ­optimum conditions,” said Huang Hung-wen (黃宏文), deputy ­director of the MOC Department of Arts Development and head of the MOMA Tainan preparatory office. He pointed out that the museum will be the first of its kind in Taiwan to focus on a specific time span, currently envisaged as beginning with the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945) and stretching to the 1960s. “The spectrum may be widened as it is still under discussion,” he added.

Huang considers Tainan, which ­celebrated its 400th anniversary last year as Taiwan’s oldest city, an ideal location for the facility given its long history as a ­cultural center. An exhibition exploring the country’s early modern and modern art was held at TAM to mark the conception of MOMA Tainan. The event took its title, “The Formosa Era,” from an essay written over a century ago by sculptor Huang Tu-shui (黃土水) and included work by painter Chen Cheng-po (陳澄波), sculptor Pu Tian-sheng (蒲添生), and more than 100 other artists born before 1950 in Taiwan, China and Japan.

Accessible History

Pu’s postwar body of sculpture is a representative example of better-known work documented under the RTAHP. Pieces by Pu and his son Pu Hao-ming (蒲浩明), also a sculptor, were exhibited ­together as a ­cross-generational dialogue at TAM Building 1. Huang says that this ornate building, dating from the Japanese ­colonial period, will serve as the main space for the reorganized TAM and will maintain a close relationship with MOMA Tainan. The RTAHP connection will extend to other municipal and private museums, forming an alliance to raise awareness of Taiwan artists by showing their work in accessible spaces. According to Liao ­Hsin-tien (廖新田), professor at NTUA Graduate School of Arts Management and Cultural Policy and director-general of the National Museum of History from 2018 to 2022, such networks are emerging across the country.

Liao looks forward to collaboration between the MOC and Ministry of Education to offer a national syllabus on local art history from the primary to tertiary levels. “Research, collection and restoration of artifacts, exhibitions and ­publications are all being undertaken so that the younger generation can be made aware of their own country’s art history in ­addition to receiving a general ­education in aesthetics,” he said. Digital access is a natural conduit for young people, and the MOC cited ways in which RTAHP has ­benefited from the ­Cabinet-level National Science and Technology Council’s input. The council has participated in the project to gather data to train the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine, a large language model ­incorporating information about Taiwan culture.
 

In recent years museums like TAM have been established throughout the ­country: in the northern cities of Keelung and Taoyuan, the central county of Changhua and the southern city of Chiayi, in addition to decades-old municipal art museums in the capital and in the southern city of Kaohsiung. This year the New Taipei City Art Museum opened, and the northern county of Hsinchu, after holding an international architectural competition, is also planning the construction of a new fine art museum. Last year Hsinchu County Government Cultural Affairs Bureau ­received ­donations from the ­family of Tsai In-tang (蔡蔭棠), an oil and ­watercolor painter who was born in 1909 in Hsinchu’s Xinpu Township. “Many municipal ­governments are working hard to build art archives relevant to their own history and culture,” Liao said. “Local RTAHP ­initiatives echo and work in ­tandem with the central government’s ­ambition and promote equal access to ­cultural life reflecting a unique Taiwan identity.” 

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw