Taichung Inexperienced Museumbrary in central Taiwan, designed by SANAA Architects / Courtesy of Taichung Artwork Museum
TAICHUNG, Taiwan — “The structure is filled with insides and outsides. You’re continuously stepping out, then again in once more,” stated Korean artist Haegue Yang after strolling by way of the newly opened Taichung Artwork Museum, a part of Taichung Inexperienced Museumbrary in central Taiwan.
Right here, any try to attract a agency boundary between exterior and inside rapidly loses which means, a reality written into the buildings’ facades.
Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese structure agency SANAA, the advanced contains eight cubic buildings of various sizes, every wrapped in a veil of metallic mesh that lets daylight and breeze seep by way of. As soon as inside, guests are invited to float alongside winding pathways, staircases, ramps and skybridges, shifting freely from one dice to the following.
Exterior view of Taichung Inexperienced Museumbrary, which contains eight cubic buildings of various sizes, every wrapped in a veil of metallic mesh. Courtesy of Taichung Artwork Museum
That blurring extends past type to the constructing’s very operate. The advanced is, fairly boldly, each an artwork museum and a public library — a spot the place wanting and studying are intentionally entwined.
Taichung Inexperienced Museumbrary, constructed on a former navy airfield-turned-park, is extensively thought to be Taiwan’s most important cultural growth of 2025. The challenge marks the island’s newest effort to raise its worldwide profile within the arts.
Its location in Taichung, Taiwan’s second-largest metropolis, additionally nudges guests away from the capital of Taipei, which has lengthy been the island’s cultural heart and host of the Taipei Biennial. Situated roughly two hours from the capital by automobile or high-speed rail, Taichung is already dwelling to establishments just like the Nationwide Taiwan Museum of Advantageous Arts and the Asia College Museum of Trendy Artwork.
The studying space of Taichung Public Library / Courtesy of Taichung Artwork Museum
“The Taichung Artwork Museum is the town’s first municipal museum. With this position, our focus is on the artwork histories of central Taiwan. On the identical time, we hope to deepen worldwide collaborations with establishments from all over the world,” stated Lai Yi-Hsin, the museum’s director.
That ambition — to pair “worldwide aptitude with the groundedness in locality,” as Yang put it — is already obvious within the establishment’s inaugural public fee, which invited Yang alongside Taiwanese artist Michael Lin.
Yang’s “Liquid Votive — Tree Shade Triad,” her tallest set up thus far, rises as a 24-meter-tall “tree” suspended the other way up. Working along with her signature venetian blinds, together with LED tubes and laser gentle, she reimagines sacred timber lengthy revered throughout Asia as communal guardians. Close by, Lin’s floral-patterned “Processed” unfolds throughout the flat roofs of two cylindrical “glass bubbles” within the foyer.
Set up view of “A Name of All Beings: See You Tomorrow, Identical Time, Identical Place” / Courtesy of Taichung Artwork Museum
Along with these two large-scale commissions, guests are greeted by the opening exhibition, “A Name of All Beings: See You Tomorrow, Identical Time, Identical Place.”
That includes works by greater than 70 artists from over 20 nations, the present attracts on the museum’s assortment and an array of newly commissioned items. Collectively, they hint how relationships between people and nature have been imagined and reshaped over time, in dialogue with the museum’s personal pure, city and historic environment.
The presentation strikes fluidly throughout generations. Works by Twentieth-century masters of central Taiwan reminiscent of Chen Ting-Shih and Wang Ching-Shuang, which quietly study human-nature entanglements, are proven alongside up to date installations that reach these inquiries into new kinds. Amongst them is Chen Yin-Ju’s “Evocative of Mountains and Seas,” an immersive reconstruction of legendary creatures recorded in a 2,000-year-old Chinese language bestiary. Guests transfer by way of a sensorial panorama of sound, scent and softly illuminated textual content, as historical imagery is translated into a up to date, embodied expertise.
Set up view of “A Name of All Beings” / Courtesy of Taichung Artwork Museum
Set up view of “A Name of All Beings” / Courtesy of Taichung Artwork Museum
Items by worldwide artists additional unsettle mounted distinctions between the human and the pure. Joan Jonas’ bamboo paper kites hover in area, their fragility animated by air. Adrien Tirtiaux’s “Publish-Museum Evidences (the Drill)” disrupts the galleries rather more forcefully: a large drill pierces a hallway and two exhibition rooms, exposing the layers of concrete, insulation and metal beneath the museum’s surfaces. The constructing itself thus turns into a part of the work, its supplies become a register of reminiscence.
Accessibility and incapacity are additionally central issues of the exhibition. Korean artist Seung Hyun Moon’s “On Skinny and Clear Issues” is a video efficiency made throughout the museum’s development, through which three performers, together with Moon himself, transfer slowly by way of unfinished galleries. Born with cerebral palsy, Moon attracts on his personal expertise of navigating areas not designed with disabled our bodies in thoughts. Amid mud and scaffolding, the three hint refined waves and vibrations, expressing how human our bodies work together with structure in flux.
A nonetheless from Moon Seung-hyun’s “On Skinny and Clear Issues” (2025) / Courtesy of the artist
Alongside these items is an archival show of pictures of American writer and incapacity rights advocate Helen Keller, in addition to early unique sketches for Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince” — a narrative typically learn as an allegory of alienation and other ways of being on this planet.
“A Name of All Beings,” which opened on Saturday, runs by way of April 12, 2026.
