Founded in 2016, the Bethlehem Mission Society Friendship Circle connects friends, organizes community events and promotes the Bethlehem Mission Society, a Catholic organization. The Friendship Circle will commemorate over 70 years of Mission Society activity in Taiwan this month with an art exhibition beginning tomorrow. A 33 artist residency at the Bethlehem Mission Society House, which is located on Hangchou Street (杭州街) in the middle of Taitung, will also be open for public viewing.
“Works expressing the clergy’s devotion,” will be on display, according to a press-release, including artwork by artists of the Puyuma indigenous community. There will be sculpture, illustrations and big canvas paintings created by people “from a diverse background” that are united by a “mutual theme” — that is, “to record and pass on the touching stories of the Bethlehem Mission Society.”
The Bethlehem Mission Society (Societas Missionum Exterarum de Bethlehem in Helvetia or SMB), is a Catholic religious order that was founded in Immensee, Switzerland in 1895. Originally headquartered in Northeast China, the Mission Society relocated to Taiwan in 1953.
Photo courtesy of Bethlehem Mission Society
After establishing its headquarters in Taitung County, the mission helped found St. Mary’s Hospital as well as several local nursing homes, among them, St. Joseph’s Kung-Tung Technical Senior High School (私立公東高級工業職業學校) which was founded by the Taiwan mission’s founder, Father Jakob Hilber, in 1960.
In addition to missionary work, SMB priests and volunteers have, over subsequent decades, built more schools and hospitals, as well as professional training centers and kindergartens, often in remote, mountainous areas populated by aboriginal people.
Art and creativity has long be practiced and promoted by the clergy who are said to decorate their chapels and houses with art pieces made from “recycled and found materials” which has “deeply inspired” local artists.
Photo courtesy of Bethlehem Mission Society
■ Bethlehem Love Art Exhibition, Taitung County Arts Center (台東縣藝文中心), 25, Nanjing Road, Taitung City (台東市南京路25號); open house 34 Hangjhou Street, Taitung City (台東縣台東市杭州街34號)
■ Until April 16, open Tuesday through Sunday from 9am to 5pm
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
My previous column Donovan’s Deep Dives: The powerful political force that vanished from the English press on April 23 began with three paragraphs of what would be to most English-language readers today incomprehensible gibberish, but are very typical descriptions of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) internal politics in the local Chinese-language press. After a quiet period in the early 2010s, the English press stopped writing about the DPP factions, the factions changed and eventually local English-language journalists could not reintroduce the subject without a long explanation on the context that would not fit easily in a typical news article. That previous
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
April 29 to May 5 One month before the Taipei-Keelung New Road (北基新路) was set to open, the news that US general Douglas MacArthur had died, reached Taiwan. The military leader saw Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was of huge strategic value to the US. He’d been a proponent of keeping it out of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hands. Coupled with the fact that the US had funded more than 50 percent of the road’s construction costs, the authorities at the last minute renamed it the MacArthur Thruway (麥帥公路) for his “great contributions to the free world and deep