Taipei city councilors yesterday urged the city's Cultural Affairs Bureau to make public the profit and loss statements of two art centers located in restored historical sites.
Four councilors yesterday inspected the SPOT-Taipei Film House (
"The Cultural Affairs Bureau contracted private sector companies or individuals to manage the restored art centers, which was the idea that we [city councilors] supported," said New Party City Councilor Fei Hung-tai (費鴻泰). "But we think the maintenance of the historical sites and the management of the profits should be clearly separated."
Fei said the current situation was that the operators of the two art centers are also playing the role of supervisors, which he thought was inappropriate.
"The two art centers are located in Taipei's golden mile and the bureau also allocated budgets for them if they are in the red. But the bureau was not clear about the business aspect," Fei said.
The SPOT-Taipei Film House, located on Chungshan N. Road, is the former American ambassa-dor's residence that had been built by the Japanese in 1926. After the restoration, sponsored by the Education and Culture Foundation of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台機電文教基金會), SPOT was converted into an arthouse movie theater and exhibition space in November last year. It is managed by movie director Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) and his staff, who aimed to make it a film-oriented complex promoting Taiwanese movies. In addition to the movie theaters, the SPOT-Taipei Film House also runs a coffee shop and a restaurant that the city councilors claim is making good business.
The Taipei Story House, located on Yuanshan Road, was built in 1914 by a Taiwanese tea trader, Chen Chao-chun (陳朝駿), as his private villa to receive his friends.
Chen Kuo-tsi (
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Councilor Li-Keng Kuei-fang (
Cultural Affairs Bureau Director Liao Hsien-hao (廖咸浩) said the two art centers just opened last year and have thus far not any made money, as far as he knew.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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