Taiwan Today

Reinvigorating small towns starts with their history and builds on local cultural connections.

Yuejin in northern Tainan’s Yanshui District means “moon harbor,” named for its crescent shape. During the Qing dynasty (1683-1895) it was home to a busy river port and was a prosperous trading hub with around 150,000 residents at its peak. Currently, the district in the southern Taiwan city has a small, mostly senior, population of about 25,000. However, this swells each January and February during the area’s lunar new year celebrations. Joining the explosive traditional Yanshui Beehive Fireworks Festival, one of the most well-known folk religion celebrations in Taiwan, is a new, quieter event: Yuejin Lantern Festival. Launched in 2010, the annual occasion is different from other lantern festivals in that rather than traditional themes like the year’s zodiac animal, it takes the form of an installation art exposition along the riverbanks. This year’s edition, dubbed “Moonlight in Town,” showcased 75 works by local and overseas artists, as well as students from the city’s universities including Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA), National Cheng Kung University and Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology. Among exhibition highlights was local Yu-Yu Art Studio’s “Light Exists.” Composed of LED lights and densely packed bamboo shafts, the piece suggests the travel of light and shadow through tangled curves as a visual metaphor for accumulated memories.

Hive Mind

Yu-Yu Art Studio manages Yuejin Art Museum overseen by Tainan City Government’s Cultural Affairs Bureau (CAB), which co-organizes the lantern festival and runs an open-air museum established in 2019. The studio was founded in 2009 by TNNUA Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts alumnus Chen Yu-ting (陳禹廷) and his brother Chen Yu-lin (陳禹霖) after they returned to Yanshui from Japan, where they worked at events like the Setouchi Triennale in the Seto Inland Sea islands. In 2008, the Chens were approached by officials from the local government with a request for ideas to celebrate the completion of the Yuejin riverside and old street renovation project. With input from the brothers and other artists, the art show is now an annual event around the lunar new year period, including the three-day Yanshui Beehive Fireworks Festival. Chen Yung-chieh (陳雍杰), who heads the CAB’s Cultural Research Division, credits the latter extraordinary festival with establishing an unforgettable image for the area. The fireworks take place after dark, with hundreds of rockets launched in all directions from stacked frames along the route of a palanquin carrying a statue of the god of war, Kuan Kung, through the streets for him to inspect the land and ward off disease. The faithful, bundled up in protective clothing and helmets, stand around the frames, hoping to be hit by a rocket and be blessed with good fortune for the coming year. The procession culminates at a school sports field where the fearless run through a barrage of firecrackers. “A strong cultural brand has emerged from the festival and continued to attract new visitors,” Chen said.

The open-air museum is actively involved in community regeneration as part of the regional revitalization campaign across the country backed by local bodies like the CAB and central government agencies like the National Development Council. The Yuejin initiative is on the Cabinet-level agency’s list of model cultural reference projects. “Art is a good way to attract young people to move to and live in Yanshui,” Chen Yu-ting said. As an example, Yu-Yu Art Studio’s Li Jhih-han (李芷涵) was born in 1995, grew up in the southernmost county of Pingtung and graduated from Nanhua University in Chiayi County before relocating to Yanshui. “In the future, some artists may start families here or buy property in the area,” Chen said, adding that local art platforms attract other artists to take up residence too. “It expands opportunities outside of big cities like Taipei.”

Resident Art

The Yuejin festival’s 2018 edition won a Germany-based Red Dot Design Award in the brands and communication design category for its “convergence of urban spaces and art” with the slogan “future visions for a city with the will to make wonderful things happen.” Since then, the winter event along the riverfront has been joined by a collaborative autumn project of installations by both artists and residents in Yanshui’s alleys and streets. This year, they painted lanterns with the characters for “we,” the year’s theme. Some of the results were displayed around historic buildings restored with funding from the Ministry of Culture’s (MOC) Private Old Buildings Preservation and Rejuvenation Plan launched in 2017 for eligible structures built before 1971, as well as from city government subsidy programs introduced in the early 2010s. The renovated century-old Yuejin Story House now operates under the CAB as a tourist information center and showroom for young artists, while across the street, a restored Japanese-era (1895-1945) bank is now a bistro and art venue.

Meanwhile in Chiayi’s Minxiong Township, third generation pharmacist Ngoo Tsi-khai (吳至鎧) is a recipient of subsidies and technical guidance from an MOC program for renovation work. He restored a former restaurant from the Japanese and post-World War II eras to serve as the base for the Dovoha Cultural Association, which is named after the earliest known inhabitants of the Minxiong area, the Lloa Indigenous tribe. The association is headed by Ngoo’s father Ngoo Ka-bun (吳嘉文), a pharmacist and amateur artist who developed an interest in drawing due to living near one of Taiwan’s pioneering Western-style painters, Liu Sin-lu (劉新祿), as a child. The younger Ngoo graduated in 2015 from Kaohsiung Medical University in the southern city and then worked in Taipei before moving back to Minxiong to help run the family pharmacy. He encouraged his father to draw images and maps of the town’s streets based on his memories, and now the sketches are used in National Chung Cheng University’s (CCU) Minxiong Studies classes.

Rich Folklore

Minxiong is home to the unique Dashiye ceremony held in the seventh month of the lunar calendar and popularly known as ghost month. The annual event organized by Dashiye Temple soothes the souls of those who lost their lives in plagues or local faction battles so they do not cause trouble on the earthly plane. In Taiwan’s folk canon, Dashiye is one of the few deities who does not appear in a set form as a statue. Thus the temple makes a papier-mache statue of Dashiye, pastes eyes on it to invite the deity’s presence and enshrines the immortal in the main hall of the county-listed monument for the public to worship. After a ceremony that lasts for three days, the statue is burned at the end of the festival to allow Dashiye to ascend to heaven, taking the wandering ghosts and lost souls with him. In September, the younger Ngoo attended this festival for the first time with camera in hand to record everything. He noted that there are a lot of unique facets to be explored, interpreted and presented to the public. “In essence, community revitalization is based on a place’s historical roots and cultural heritage,” he said.

Established last year, Dovoha works to explore and spotlight local culture and history in collaboration with academics and students from CCU as part of the Ministry of Education’s University Social Responsibility project. The association comprises around 30 members spanning academics, farmers and post office staff, as well as those from local art groups such as contemporary performance troupe Our Theatre and the indie band Tsng-kha-lang, which means “country people” in the Holo language. In recent years a growing interest in Minxiong studies promoted by Dovoha members and other grassroots activists has seen an increasing number of art professionals like Our Theatre and Tsng-kha-lang and individuals like Ngoo Tsi-khai return to reinvigorate their hometowns. 

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw