Next Sunday, Taiwan’s oldest museum hopes to lure a more diverse crowd through its front door.
The National Taiwan Museum (NTM, 國立台灣博物館) is holding an “open museum day,” offering free admission for migrant workers and foreign spouses to all exhibits on Sunday, Sept. 14.
There’s the Exhibition of Islamic Life and Culture (伊斯蘭:文化與生活特展), which will be on view for its final day.
Photo Courtesy of National Taiwan Museum
By popular demand, Exhibition of Islamic Life and Culture has been extended from its original closing date of June 22 to next Sunday.
This special exhibition presents religious artifacts, manuscripts, musical instruments and other objects that survey Islamic civilization and daily life.
NTM, located at the 228 Peace Memorial Park in downtown Taipei, opened its doors in 1908. It is the only museum established during the Japanese colonial era that is still in operation at its original site.
On Sundays and holidays, the 228 Peace Memorial Park is full of migrant workers, new immigrants and foreign spouses meeting friends on their day off.
Workers seldom enter the museum for a visit, according to museum staff.
“I asked our staff to speak to them and to find out why. Most of them preferred to stay at a distance because they didn’t think the museum was for foreigners and blue-collar workers,” said NTM deputy director Lin Hwa-ching (林華慶).
Lin said NTM wants to connect with migrant workers and new immigrants, particularly to invite them into the Exhibition of Islamic Life and Culture.
“Quite a number of migrant workers and foreign spouses are from Indonesia and are Muslims. So this exhibit can promote multicultural dialogue and mutual exchange,” he said.
Lin said that the exhibit may also be able to help the children of international marriages explore the cultural traditions of their parent’s home country.
Next Sunday, visitors can also view NTM’s other exhibits: Mysterious Pescadores, about the biodiversity and marine geomorphology of southern Penghu County’s four islands; Taiwan Black Jade, about unique Taiwanese gems from the metamorphic rocks of the east coast; and an exhibition on the Hokutolite (北投石), a radium-containing rare mineral from Beitou’s hot springs which was discovered in 1905 by the renowned Japanese mineralogist Okamoto Yohachiro.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby