TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — The Taichung Art Museum has opened at the Taichung Green Museumbrary, a cultural complex that houses both the city’s premier art museum and public library.
The museum’s inaugural exhibition, "A Call of All Beings," features more than 90 works by 70 artists from over 20 countries. The collection explores intersections of geological history, contemporary ecology, and human memory.
Designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning firm SANAA, the "Museumbrary" is described as a "library in a park and a museum in a forest." The architecture features a lightweight, translucent expanded mesh that integrates the structure into the surrounding greenery, reflecting a curatorial mission to dissolve barriers between art and daily life.
The exhibition was developed by the museum’s team in collaboration with Taiwanese curator Chou Ling-chih (周伶芝), American curator Alaina Claire Feldman, and Romanian curator Anca Mihulet-Kim. It draws inspiration from the site’s history as the former Shuinan Airport and its current role as Central Park.
Lai Yi-hsin (賴依欣), director of the Taichung Art Museum, said the project is more than an exhibition; it is a reflection on ecological relationships. "The relationship and connection in human nature is the core soul of the entire show," said Lai.
While the museum did not set out to recruit an all-female curatorial team, Lai said the collaboration yielded a uniquely nuanced result.
"This kind of feminine, 'yin' approach is profoundly important for this topic," Lai said. “It successfully intertwines local geological research with global environmental-political discourse.”
The exhibition’s centerpiece is a massive, site-specific commission by internationally renowned sculptor Yang Haegue. The South Korean artist’s installation, “Liquid Votive- Tree Shade Triad,” stands 23 meters tall in the museum’s 27-meter-high atrium.
It is the artist’s tallest work to date using her signature medium: Venetian blinds. Yang spent 20 years exploring the sculptural potential of the industrial material, transforming it here into a colorful, animistic "inverted giant tree."
The work draws on East Asian traditions of "sacred trees," such as Taiwan’s Da Shu Gong. As visitors ascend a spiral ramp, they view the suspended structure from shifting perspectives.
At night, the piece transforms with vertical LED strips and laser points, creating what Yang calls a "ceremony of light" that activates the senses.
Other major works challenge the physical boundaries of the museum, including Belgian artist Adrien Tirtiaux’s “Post-Museum Evidence,” which pierces through floors and ceilings to expose the building’s rebar, concrete and soil layers, revealing the hidden history of its construction.
Korean artist Moon Seung Hyun, who has cerebral palsy, presents “On Thin and Transparent Things.” In the piece, three performers interpret the body’s relationship to space amid residual construction dust.
Japanese artist Suzuki Yuya created a "garden" of marine and urban debris collected in Taipei and Taichung, merging the museum’s interior with the 12,000 native trees planted in the surrounding park.
SANAA’s design allows the public to transition from a park stroll to an art gallery. "The boundary lines appear to disappear," the curators noted.
The exhibition runs through spring 2026.
(Taiwan News, Lyla Liu video)
