Shingo Ohtaki, a Japanese on a four-day tour to Taiwan, chose to visit the museum during free time on the last day of his travel schedule.
“I wanted to go some place special in the city, and I looked into my guidebook and spotted the museum,” Ohtaki explained. “We do not have museums specializing in dollhouses and the like in Japan, and for me, this one is so interesting that the guidebook should have given it an extra, larger space,” he said, while admiring the replica of a 1960s street market in Ikeda City, Osaka, Japan. The work is complete with stores, signs and products, and one can almost smell the aroma wafting out from a buckwheat noodle shop.
The privately run Miniature Museum of Taiwan is Asia’s first and only institute dedicated to miniature artworks. The museum houses the decades-long collection of founder Lin Wen-jen.
Retired from the presidency of Taiwan Fluorescent Lamp Co. Ltd. almost 20 years ago, Lin traveled extensively to different parts of the world both before and after retirement. He then settled down to serious collecting. On his earlier business trips, Lin would shop for model cars and toy figurines as gifts for children.
Gift shopping turned into a costly hobby as he and his wife gradually fell for European dollhouses and American room boxes. “My children love them, and my wife became the more interested one,” the 76-year-old laughed.
He finally set up the museum in 1997 to house his collection, with some pieces purchased from makers and collectors and others commissioned later by the pair as Lin got more involved in the world of miniature makers and market fairs.
Around 220 works from Lin’s collection rotate in the exhibition hall nestled in the basement of a company building. The lighting and space design seduce people to a world away from the hustle and bustle of reality.
Pieces on display range from a standard one-twelfth scale Buckingham Palace to an 18-century backstreet building in east-end London, from an imagined Alice in Wonderland to the real former Russian consulate building in San Francisco, from a British pub to an American gas station-cum-garage. The miniature rooms and structures filled with vivid details and characters intrigue viewers, who spend hours in the museum setting their imaginations free, according to Lin. The works allow visitors a bird’s-eye view of sociocultural history.
Lin, who roams through the display space several times a day, has his own stories about each of the major works.
One of his most cherished is about the “Rose Mansion”—a Victorian-era building Reginald Twigg, an American, reproduced on the standard 1:12 scale from the now-demolished 1885 original in downtown Los Angeles. Twigg was studying for his doctorate in the history of architecture and making the model house as part of his dissertation project, Lin recalled. Twigg lost support for the project when the sponsoring couple had a car accident, killing the husband and seriously injuring the wife.
Lin noticed Twigg’s advertisement for a new sponsor in a magazine on miniatures, and decided to help. It took Twigg four and a half years, including time spent on textual research, to build the scale-model mansion from original materials. Completed in 1992, the structure now greets visitors to the museum, standing as grandly as the original Rose Mansion once did. “The work is most significant to me in that I helped a student to go on,” the silver-haired director said.
The spirit of helpfulness and encouragement permeates the museum. Benches allow children to take a closer and clearer peek into works placed inside glass chambers.
Overseas visitors feel at home, not only because there are English, Japanese and Chinese-language captions to each piece, but also because the lifelike models are replete with accurate cultural details and set in typical local landscapes, reminding people away from home of their origins.
In addition to its rotating displays, the museum features regularly organized special exhibits and competitions for local miniature artists to encourage the creation and appreciation of Lilliputian art.
A look back at Lin’s career gives some insight into his museum initiative.
Lin was a mechanical engineer and a factory director. He designed and built plants for TFC, then the largest fluorescent lamp maker in Taiwan. The company took the lion’s share of the market and exports at its peak in the 1980s. Lin rose to management level before he retired.
As president of the company Lin gave special importance to on-the-job training and the welfare of employees and their families. The TFC, in its heyday, was lauded as a “model enterprise” by the government.
Subsequent power reshuffles in the company, however, led to changes in its management strategies, which valued the market over staff welfare. Losses and struggle foreboded the TFC’s decline and eventual close in 2008.
When talking about this part of his past, Lin appeared disappointed, having had to witness the decay of both a company and a humane ideal. At the same time, though, this past has given him new dedication.
“I am urging the government to help more private people set up specialized museums,” Lin said. He was invited to take part in consultation meetings top cultural officials held with museums on the drafting of the country’s first museum act, which has been over 10 years in the making.
In Taiwan, Lin said, public museums enjoy far more resources than privately run museums, which occupy a vague status in the country’s administrative hierarchy. The miniatures museum, for example, by law could not register as a museum.
Lin said the new museum act should lower the threshold for the opening of private museums and have respect for their operational creativity. Private museums have different functions than public ones, he said, and they will add diversity to local cultural life. “A robust private museum scene is an index of a country’s soft power,” he said.
Yet for the present, the museum founder is keeping his dreams on a smaller scale. He hopes to secure a larger space for his collection of miniatures so visitors can spend comfortable, carefree hours in his scaled-down world. (THN)
Write to June Tsai at june@mail.gio.gov.tw