Taipei has gained international fame for its 24-hour lifestyle, from night markets and late-night eateries to the multitude of convenience stores and Welcome supermarkets where you can grocery shop at 3am to Eslite’s Tunhwa S Road branch that keeps booklovers happy at all hours. On Saturday, all-night art and performances can be added to the list.
This year the nation’s capital is joining the ranks of scores of cities around the globe that host a nighttime arts festival on the first Saturday in October that is known as Nuit Blanche, which turns the cities into gigantic art galleries.
The idea for Nuit Blanche is credited to Frenchman Jean Blaise, who was inspired by Helsinki’s “Night of the Arts” in 1989 that saw museums, galleries and bookstores open until midnight or later, and he created multi-day nighttime cultural festivals for Nantes and several other cities.
Photo Courtesy of WERC
He was later hired by the Paris government to create a similar event for the French capital, but condensed into a single night, that would allow the public to discover art and artists in six sections of the city. The first Nuite Blanche was held in October 2002, with the dual aim of making contemporary art more accessible to a mass audience and encouraging people to explore parts of the city they might otherwise not often go to.
Over the past 14 years, cities as diverse as Kyoto, Port-au-Prince, Brussels, Riga, Washington, Toronto and Oran in Algeria have been inspired to launch their own versions.
With Taipei celebrating its designation as this year’s World Design Capital, city officials thought it seemed like a perfect opportunity to bring the combination of art, design, urban innovation and performances that is Nuit Blanche to Taiwan.
Photo Courtesy of Light Rider
Nuit Blanche Taipei (臺北白晝之夜) will run from 6pm on Saturday to 6am on Sunday at locations around the city, from North Gate (北門) to Dadaocheng (大稻埕), to the 228 Peace Memorial Park (228和平公園), the National Taiwan Museum and lots of spaces in between, beginning with an opening parade at the museum.
However, the heart and soul of the event will be the streets and alleys around the North Gate, the old center of Taipei.
There will be art installations, performances and concerts by foreign and Taiwanese artists, musicians and DJs, some well-known, some not, for a total of 27 events and 21 works of art.
Photo Courtesy of Thunar Circus
The events have grouped under five themes: A Play of Dadaocheng, Museum of Betrayal, Beyond Time South Road, Between Back to the Future and Falling in Love with the City.
The motto for Nuite Blanche participants should probably be “expect the unexpected.”
For example, the four-person art collective WERC, based in Groningen in The Netherlands, is installing Lily, a microprocessor-based organism, in the 228 Peace Memorial Park’s pond.
Olav Huizer said the collective’s projects range from installations and graphic design to stage design and video mapping and Lily, which was staged twice this summer at festivals in The Netherlands, grew out of research about creating an organism based on simple rules.
The microprocessors communicate with each other by radio frequency as they spread over a body of water; they are clones, but they must interpret the data they receive and make decisions, which means they are not completely controllable by their “masters.”
Among the other offerings, a group of multi-domain artists known as THUNAR Circus will perform FLYWAY Delivrance 9 (當代馬戲) at the Taipei Post Office on Chunghsiao W Road, while the Dadaocheng Youth Taiwanese Opera (大稻埕青年歌仔戲團) will perform The Choice of Heaven or Earth (天地情選折) on the Taiwan Color Stage Truck.
There is far too much to try to describe here, but the Taipei Department of Cultural Affairs and the curators of the event have put together a great Web site (www.nuitblanche.taipei), with a timetable, download-able map and details of the artwork, performances and artists.
However, not everyone is enthusiastic about the possibilities of Nuit Blanche.
Documentary director Hung Wei-chien (洪維健) on Wednesday last week criticized the department for spending NT$9.2 million (US$292,714) on the event, which he said was just aimed at promoting Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) Western Gateway Project.
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