Long frustrated in its ambition to build a glass museum in Taiwan, a renowned contemporary glass studio founded by Taiwanese artists remains determined to fulfill its quest and help preserve the culture of glass art in its homeland.
Liuli Gongfang, founded in 1987 by Taiwanese actress Loretta Yang (楊惠珊) and director Chang Yi (張毅), has been more active in China than in Taiwan in recent years, expanding its business there and establishing a museum in Shanghai in 2006.
However, that does not mean the company is ignoring its roots.
“We are from Taiwan. Of course we want to return to our homeland,” Wang Hsiu-chuan (王秀娟), the company’s general manager for China, said in an interview on Tuesday.
“However, just thinking about opening a glass museum in Taiwan, we’ve searched for 12 years and still have not found a piece of land,” she said.
Wang said the company now hopes to obtain a piece of land on the old Songshan Tobacco Factory site in Taipei, but she did not elaborate on how likely that was.
The company’s plight in Taiwan contrasts with the reception the museum idea received in China, which has aggressively supported cultural and creative industries.
Wang said that when the Shanghai Municipal Government heard about Liuli Gongfang’s original plan to build a museum there, it offered assistance to get the project done.
It then helped with the relocation of the museum last year by providing land across from Shanghai’s Tianzifang art street, one of the city’s cultural hubs.
The museum reopened with an exhibition featuring the first piece created by Yang and other important works by Taiwanese artists, but it was unfortunate, Wang said, that glass art reflecting Taiwan’s characteristics and soft power could only be displayed in China.
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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