Public art projets sensitively embrace our communities

When a community public art project sensitively takes on the concerns of the local residents, the project becomes more than just decorative baubles as in the case of the Tainan's Hai-an Road public art, which are mainly facades of buildings painted and decorated by Taiwanese artists.

In contrast, organizers and artists of the 2nd Taipei Public Art Festival (台北公共藝術節) of the Dihua Sewage Treatment Plant worked within the local community, so the project takes on the functions of urban renewal, historical renovation and community revitalization.

Artist Huang Tzi-chin (黃子欽) cleaned up an abandoned building at 386 Dihua St, Sec 2,Taipei, to the delight of the neighbors and shows work that tells the history of the people who inhabit the neighborhood. On a tiny winding street, Li Jiun-yang (李俊陽) painted a mural opposite a house where an elderly woman sat -- and still sits -- in her chair chatting with passersby. Lin would chat with her and found out her favorite tale was of the Monkey King, so he painted the legend on the wall partly out of respect.

The famed Confucious Temple on Dalong Street now houses a controversial installation by Chung Wen-yin (鍾文音) titled My Classroom of Grannies Return to Frozen Moments Among Tables, Chairs. It includes hot-pink gauzy curtains and displays photos of famous female authors such as Eileen Chang, Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag, as well as images of local women and family members.

Confucian temples are known for revering the work and achievements of male scholars, not female ones. The director of the temple strongly urged the artist and curator to not install the piece because she thought it may be offensive to the regular temple-goers, since the installation contained a heavy feminist slant with the look of a bordello. However, the artist and curator didn't back down, and the informative installation remains a popular and well-visited site.

Originally from Taiwan, artist and community activist Lily Yeh (葉蕾蕾) has been based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for decades. Her foundation, the Village of Arts and Humanities, transformed a dangerous inner-city park into a positive urban-renewal project of beautiful mosaics. The Village gave hope to many people and works in Latin America, Africa and Asia providing job training and arts education, rebuilding and revitalizing local communities through the arts.

Yeh came to Taipei and did art workshops with students at the Taipei School for the Hearing Impaired (台北市立啟聰學校), and these workshops will culminate in a 17m-by-17m mosaic, a huge mosaic that will require a lot of volunteers to look at a paper grid and place the corresponding color tiles onto one-foot squares. The remaining squares must be finished before mid-May. The volunteer work takes place at the school at 320 Chungching N Rd, Sec 3 (臺北市重慶北路三段320號) from 6pm to

9:30pm on weekdays and from 9am to 9:30pm on weekends. If you would like to participate in this vital community project please contact Sandy Lo (羅秀芝) at sean.chang@seed.net.tw.

Lo represented Taiwan as one of the curators of Shanghai Cool, which recently ended at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition included curators with their selected artists from Japan, China and South Korea. For Lo's section titled Pop Pill, she included pop manga artist Hung Tung-lu (洪東祿), who recently moved to Shanghai, and Taipei-based Channel A, a group that includes Lin Hongjohn.