Department of Cultural Affairs

Project Strolling | Wei Hsin-Yen
(散步計畫｜魏欣妍)

In 2001, at its current location at No. 7, Beiping East Road, the Taipei Artist Village (TAV) began rolling out cultural diplomacy, urban exchange, and art residency projects, entering the world stage beginning with the capital. The residency program known as Artist-in-Residence Taipei has been around for more than 20 years. For the 20th anniversary of TAV’s executive role in 2021, we look back on its history and forecast that in the future the program will move to the south side of Taipei.

Living in a foreign city opens up the senses and subverts stereotypical expectations. Although the residency program has limited capacity, as a base for nurturing creative processes, it fosters boundless imagination. During the residency, the artist explores culture and experiences life, combining sights and sounds with personal history, and when the audience enter the village they can see the city where they live and how it appears in the eyes of others.

 Window in a Window | Wu Chien-Yi (2021)
(窗中之窗｜吳芊頤（2021）)

The Foldable Time—Twenty Years’ Distance | Chen Shiau-Peng (2021)
(可折疊的時間（二十年的距離）｜陳曉朋（2021）)

When you enter the artist village, you can see what a city looks like. An artist village is not the holy grail for high art. It is a site rooted in real life. More specifically, living in an artist village focuses your line of vision back and forth between local and international perspectives. This kind of focusing sprouts and thrives in the bits and pieces of daily life, building the city’s height and breadth through art and culture. The collective experience here also fosters a sense of common ground for free-flowing and open interactions.

On October 12, 2001, the Taipei Department of Cultural Affairs set up the Taipei Artist Village at No. 7 Beiping East Road, former location of the Conservation Engineering Office, in an attempt to repurpose the site as an artist space for creative work and life in line with the philosophy of revitalizing unused space. The artist residency program works together with Taipei’s urban features to foster interaction between local and international artists and local communities, acting as a bridge connecting different cultures, fulfilling artists’ social responsibility, realizing city-centric multicultural development, and building up trans-national networks. It includes strong networks of residencies, exhibitions, speeches, performances, publishing, websites, and community platforms. We hope to target individuals such as artists, writers, and critics with an interest in Taiwanese art and culture, or international organizations such as non-profit organizations and artist residency institutions, to provide them with an open space in which they can transcend the limitations and barriers of region-centric cultural and political situations and create a higher-level, borderless space for free and open interaction.

 Still Life Analysis II: The Island | Chen I-Hsuen
(靜物研究II：島民｜陳以軒)

In continuation of the 20th anniversary trilogy project, in its first installment the Art Collection Project alludes to parts of speech, transforming several aspects into a “noun, verb, or adjective”. On their creative journey, the artist has the freedom to collect, feel, and experience the unknown in this place, and describe a certain imagining of a space, base, or city while living in the village. This year, we divide the process of the artist residency into tenses. Both artists and TAV have faced, are facing, and will face challenges in the past, present, and future. When physical entities are replaced by cloud-based entities, will the disappearance of creative bases be a matter of due course? When boundaries between the real and virtual grow increasingly blurred, will remote imagining become a reasonable way of life?

2022 TAV Art Collection Project exhibition site

This year, the Chain Village residency program was held on the theme of “Taipei Imagination”, with an open call for artists around the world to take part in a cloud-based residency, and residency outcomes presented in the form of a virtual exhibition room in conjunction with the Art Collection Project. We also invited six Taiwanese artists to collect materials from the city through the program, including both artists who had completed residencies at No. 7 Beiping East Road and creators selected by TAV to visit foreign cities, to review what meaning their work holds for the city, themselves, and the ecosystem, and to question what new heights and perspectives cultural stimulus can provide to the viewer in addition to the richer meaning it gives to creative careers.

▍TAV ART PROJECT TRILOGY: PROCESS

Project Schedule | November 19 to December 18 

Opening Party | November 18, 6 p.m.–10 p.m.

Venue | Taipei Art Village (No. 7, Beiping East Road, Zhongzheng District, Taipei City) 

Exhibiting Artists | 

Physical Exhibition Room: Wu Ping-Sheng (吳秉聖), Chou Shu-I (周書毅), Chen Yi-Hsuen (陳以軒), Chen Hsiang-Jung (陳向榮), Chung Cheng-Hsu (鍾承旭), Wei Hsin-Yen (魏欣妍)

Virtual Exhibition Room: 2ENTER (2ENTER 貳進), Sky Detention Center/Heat Wave (天空看守所／熱浪), Wu Yu-Hsin (吳郁欣), Kuo Lu-Ling (郭律伶), Infinite Malicious Architecture (無限惡意建築), Snow Boiler (煮雪的人), Xiang Lan (項藍), Electric Police Station (電子派出所), BansuHouse (萬事屋), Hsiao Yun-An (蕭芸安)