"Culture is a good business," said Jason Hu (
To carry out a feasibility study for the museum's first Asian branch, the CEO of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Thomas Krens, his team, and American architect Zaha Hadid, arrived in Taiwan on their third visit.
If Taichung City Council passes the NT$3 billion budget and the other NT$3 billion Hu expects to get from the central government, and if the assessment has a favorable result next month, the "movable" and "organic" structure Hadid designed for the museum will soon appear on the 5,600m2 parcel of land in the seventh redistribution area in the newly-developed part of Taichung City.
COURTESY OF TAICHUNG CITY COUNCIL
"[The construction of the museum] is an important key for us to get connected with international culture," Hu said.
Hu proposed 12 sites in Taichung during Krens' first visit to Taiwan last year. The chosen site will integrate the National Opera House and the Taichung City Administration Center to become a "Guggenheim Garden Special Zone," which will occupy 20 hectares and cost NT$12.4 billion to build.
Having branches in Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, Las Vagas and New York, the Guggenheim Musum, Krens said, now needs an Asian branch to increase cultural interaction with the region -- which will be good for the museum chain as a whole.
Like its Spanish counterpart in Bilbao, the Guggenheim Taichung will organize a significant portion of Asian contemporary art. Scholars from Hong Kong, Korea and China will help position the content of this institute to be relevant to a local and regional audience.
In the wake of its widely reported financial difficulties (the operation of its Bilbao and Les Vagas branches have been faltering), there are doubts, however, whether the new branch will survive and turn a profit.
"The Guggenheim Museum, like other similar cultural institutions, relies on tourism. The combination of September 11 and the general economy over the last two year has clearly affected tourist participation. Guggenheim reacted to the situation quickly by reducing staff and adjusting our programming," Krens said.
"The results were that we've got a lot of criticism for that but, on the other hand, we finished the year 2002 with a break-even budget, while, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York ended up in deficit."
McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm working for Guggenheim on the Taichung project, said that museums in Taiwan already attract a worldwide audience.
The top three museums, led by Taipei Fine Arts Museum, attract over 1 million visitors respectively. Among the annual 2.7 million visitors to Taiwan, Japanese visitors number 50,000 in Taichung. The number of Chinese visitors are expected to rise considerably as the regulations regarding Chinese tourism in Taiwan gradually relax.
As McKinsey's domestic market research shows, spectacular architecture is the Guggenheim Museum's biggest attraction. Zaha Hadid's "fluid" building, where movable ceilings and galleries provided greater possibility in arranging exhibitions and performances, while an open dome acts as an intersection for the roads around the museum, is the first of its kind in the country.
Mayor Hu took so much delight in the architecture that he opened its model display Tuesday with a colorful lighting show and by blaring the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey -- a confident if slightly anachronistic choice.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built