Taiwan Today

Tainan’s museum sector is the most diverse in the country.

Celebrations for Tainan City’s quadricentennial started well before 2024, the year that marks four centuries since the Dutch East India Company began construction of a fort in what is now Anping District. Last September Huang Wei-che (黃偉哲), mayor of the southern metropolis, hosted the opening ceremony for a museum exhibit at the historical Fort Zeelandia. Attendees from the Netherlands Office Taipei and the Taiwan-Japan Friendship of Culture Exchange Foundation of Tainan City reflected the international character of the country and the city that served as its capital during Dutch rule, the subsequent Ming loyalist Kingdom of Tungning (1661-1683) and government by the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).

  Zeelandia Museum was established in 2009 in a building originally erected for Qing officials in 1882 that was later used in the Japanese colonial era (1895-1945) as a customs officials’ clubhouse and a showroom for historical materials, as well as housing the district administration office after World War II. The exhibit inaugurated by Huang takes a journey through the city’s long history.
  A few months later, the mayor appeared at another opening, this time for Tainan City Museum (TCM). Housed in a building from the 1960s, the institution was originally named for Koxinga (鄭成功), the military leader famous for expelling the Dutch from Taiwan in 1662 and founding Tungning. Museum Director Wang Shih-hung (王世宏) explained that renaming the museum offered an opportunity to embrace a broader understanding of history. “Our collection has never been about a single historical personage,” he said, citing approximately 5,600 historical documents and objects dating mainly from the Qing and Japanese periods.

  Orchestrating Development
The institution oversees three facilities that inform a broad spectrum of topics and eras. Tainan Shan-Shang Garden and Old Waterworks Museum and the Tapani Incident Memorial Park showcase Japanese era engineering, structures and stories, while Zuojhen Fossil Park brings local prehistory alive by introducing visitors to animal remains dating back over 400,000 years. For these and many other sites around the city, TCM drives advancements in management and development. It also leads a collaborative platform comprising institutions like the national-level Museum of Archaeology located beside an excavation site in Southern Taiwan Science Park, the public-private Tree Valley Life Science Museum and the Tainan Astronomical Education Area, seeking to channel resources from the central government to local museums. “We maintain regular contact with our colleagues and visit them to learn about their needs,” Wang said. “Their feedback is then incorporated into biennial reports to the Ministry of Culture to elicit assistance and funding, as each museum has a unique perspective and offers insights into local culture.”

One of the more complex projects that TCM has been working on is fostering connections between the city’s music-related facilities. The most recent opened in Madou District last year and commemorates pop musician Wen Shia (文夏). Over the course of his career, he recorded more than 1,200 songs in Holo, the language of Taiwan’s largest ethnic group. Current artists like the award-winning Hsieh Ming-yu (謝銘祐), who returned to his hometown in the early 2000s to write and sing in Holo, collaborate with the museum to stage exhibits, concerts and forums promoting Holo music and exploring ways to keep it alive for future generations. Hsieh joined the city government’s 400th anniversary preparatory committee, and has curated an ongoing exhibition on pop artists Wen Shia, Hsu Shih (許石), Wu Jin-huai (吳晉淮) and other Tainan natives.

Cultivating Knowledge
Since 2017 TCM has organized an annual museum festival inspired by International Museum Day on May 18. To enhance the profile of the city’s 57 museums and cultural facilities—a larger number than in any other city or county in Taiwan—events take place over the course of a month around Tainan. Among the participating institutions is the museum on National Cheng Kung University’s (NCKU) campus. Established in 2007 as part of the school’s 76th anniversary celebrations, the museum has its main hall in the school’s Japanese era administration center.
  Wu Ping-sheng (吳秉聲) is both director of the campus museum and NCKU’s senior vice president. “We have a close relationship with our home city and cherish the role we play in the region,” Wu said as he explained one of the museum’s major missions. Each year, a team helps the NCKU Center for General Education arrange a mandatory course called “Exploring Tainan” that offers first-year students routes around the city to learn about its natural and cultural environments.

NCKU Museum management is working on further operational and structural improvements that would permit it to treat the whole campus as an eco-museum. While the main building is being refurbished, outreach continues with an exhibition on 17th-century Dutch Formosa at Silks Place Tainan. Curated by a team from the NCKU Department of Architecture, the exhibit is spread throughout the five-star hotel’s public spaces until November. “Sharing the university’s strengths in research with a broader audience is a unique opportunity,” Wu said.

International Connections
In 2016 the NCKU Museum helped found the Taiwanese Alliance of University Museums currently comprising 21 members from across the country. In 2022 Wu led the alliance to Prague to attend the triennial conference of the Paris-based International Council of Museums, which created its Committee for University Museums and Collections in 2000. The museum also helped coordinate Kurt Perschke’s RedBall project in Tainan. The American artist brought the object—4.5 meters in diameter and 122 kilograms when inflated—to the entrance of NCKU’s former library opposite the museum’s main hall on the fourth day of the art project’s tour of the city’s historical districts. “Built through U.S. postwar aid programs in 1959, the modernist building that hosted the RedBall on April 1 signifies the school’s paradigm shift from Japanese to American education styles,” Wu said.

  Also joining the rich tapestry of international events this year in Tainan is an exhibition called “Masterpieces From the National Gallery, London” that opened May 2 as part of the British institution’s 200th anniversary Asian tour. Over 50 works from iconic artists like Raphael, Rembrandt and Van Gogh are on display through Sept. 1 in the Chimei Museum. Built in the European classical style and holding one of the finest private collections of antiquities and artworks in Taiwan, the facility has become a popular attraction since it opened in 2015. Speaking at an event welcoming the exhibit to the city, Mayor Huang described it as a chance to appreciate artistic and cultural interaction between Tainan and Europe. “It echoes the spirit of this year’s Tainan 400 celebrations: treasure traditions, create the present and look forward to the future,” he said.
 

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw