A local artist on Sunday launched Taiwan’s first book on colors in natural and artificial environments in a bid to raise public awareness about them.
Chang Hwei-lan (張惠蘭), who is also an independent curator, spent one year investigating the colors seen around the Treasure Hill community in Taipei.
In her book titled Flowing Color Codes in Treasure Hill, Chang and a group of arts and landscaping students studied and analyzed colors of the elements, including streets, buildings, bridges, the ecology and landscapes in different weather conditions, time of day and seasons.
TREASURE HILL
Treasure Hill, located in Taipei’s Gongguan area and a former illegal settlement of about 200 veterans’ households, reopened last October as an artist village following four years of renovation by the Taipei City Government’s Taipei Culture Foundation.
The village and the nearby 300-year-old Treasure Hill Temple were designated as a historical site in 2004 and artists from home and abroad now live and work there, along with 22 families.
“When we built our environment with cement, we did not know what the color of the earth beneath us was,” said Chang, who has a postgraduate degree in art application from the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail in France.
EVERYDAY LIFE
She said the project aimed to remind people of the existence of colors in their everyday life and perhaps inspire them to think about the environment and nature in a new way.
She also hoped the research could influence the decisionmaking in public construction or art projects, which should use colors that blend in with the environment and local culture.
PRESERVATION
“It provides data for the preservation of Treasure Hill’s local culture, future planning and design,” the book says.
For example, she said, the colors of historic buildings should not be changed in renovation projects.
“If we do not understand a place well enough, authorities should not hastily order a color for its planning,” the book says.
“I hope the study on environmental colors can help communities change their environments for the better by experiencing and feeling colors on their own,” said Monica Kuo (郭瓊瑩), dean of the College of Environmental Design at the Chinese Culture University.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching