TAICHUNG: ART BINGE WEEKEND
- higgsfiona
- May 4, 2015
- 8 min read
My trip to Taichung a couple of weekends ago took place by virtue of accepting an invitation from my school to attend a teacher training event hosted by National Geographic, to be held in the city. Located halfway along the west coast of Taiwan, I can't say that Taichung had really ranked highly in my list of places I most want to visit - the rugged beauty of the east coast has been far more appealing. If at all I would say that the most attractive prospects for me in Taiwan's second city (after Taipei) would have been the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. The city's other big tourist feature is the National Museum of Natural Science.
There are also a number of universities in Taichung, and so there is also a strong student scene; Tung Hai University is renowned for its beautiful green campus, which is located in the north of the city. I chose my hostel, Lane 62, largely due to its proximity to this attractive university campus and the neighbouring area of Tung Hai, also home to the Tung Hai Artists' Street.
I departed from Taoyuan Train Station around 9.30pm, and it took about 1.5 hours to reach Taichung station. I had soon tired of public transport during my journey - specifically at a point when I realised that there was an old man sitting in my reserved seat on the packed commuter train . So as to live up to my British customs, I couldn’t possibly tell him to stand. Instead, I stood and watched as he took a nap in my chair. When I reached the train station in Taichung I dug deep into my pockets and took a taxi to reach the hostel for around 300 NT. My driver was a Taiwanese man, at the least he was in his sixties, with a fair grasp of the English language. I was delighted that he knew English comes from England... Despite this seeming quite obvious, it surprises me how few English language learners in Taiwan actually know this! But this wasn't the most exiting realization I made during my 25 minute taxi ride to the hostel. I was also able to make a fleeting judgement that taxi drivers in Taichung are just as distracted and friendly (if not, more so) as their counterparts in Taoyuan. By the end of the journey (which I had nervously tracked on my phone GPS) I had learned all about the cancer fighting properties of the briefly available seasonal 'loquat' fruit (aka pi pa)... and shared half a container of the aforementioned fruit with the taxi driver. He was turned in his seat to face me in the back of the car for most of the journey, all the while demonstrating the fruit peeling methods used to access the fruit, and gesturing towards the city's landmarks (out the front, side and occasionally rear view windows). I also walked into the hostel with another small shopping bag full of these tangy treats courtesy of my taxi driver.
The next morning my plans went a little awry, as the friendly staff at the hostel offered in broken English to pick up a tasty breakfast of dan bing at the local breakfast shop for me while I took a shower. Despite my best intentions to visit the university campus, my morning came to consist of an animated, extended breakfast/brunch talking with the staff about our native languages (mine being English, and theirs Chinese), and cultures.
Despite the change in my plans, I really enjoyed the morning, but I was still concerned about reaching all the places I had intended to visit by the end of the day. Before I met with my local contact who was a former student at the school where I work we also discussed what remained of my plans for the rest of the day, and they kindly offered to show me to the Art museum and the art street. I really was taken aback by their generosity. They didn't even gratefully take the opportunity to bow out once they found out that I actually had a contact in the city who was meeting me to take me to the museum. In fact, if anything they became more interested.
So, following a brief lunch at a local restaurant I followed my local contact and one of the staff members at the hostel to the art museum, which we reached by Taichung's highly efficient rapid transit system. It's a bus, basically. But it has its own lanes and so is as unaffected by traffic just like the underground MRT in Taipei. The benefit of the BRT is that you can see the city. It is verdant and the buildings built in the aftermath of the 1999 earthquake bring a more modern feeling to the city that makes it feel different and perhaps more westernized than other cities in Taiwan.
The first place we visited was the art museum, which was impressive in both structure and contents. Built in the 1980s, it is a vast open plan space in the city centre, featuring over 20 exhibition spaces that display works from mostly Taiwanese artists in a range of mediums. In 1999, on September 21st, Taichung was struck by a devastating earthquake, and many of the buildings in the city were damaged, including the art museum, which was only reopened again five years later in 2004. There were a number of exhibitions taking place at the time, but the two that we spent time looking at were ‘Finish and Unfinish’ and a solo exhibition of gouache paintings by Zhou Yu-Ting.
‘Finish and Unfinish’ featured the works of Taiwanese artists, each of which had donated one completed and one incomplete work piece. The purpose of this exhibition was for the viewer to attempt to identify which piece was the complete and which was the incomplete and then observe the difference in emotion and feeling conveyed by the artist. It was suggested that the artists' emotions and intentions of the work are most expressed when it is only 70% complete, and that the remaining 30% of detailed work that is added to a piece to make it worthy of sale or exhibition in fact covers up much of the original expressive work. I really enjoyed this exhibition - it's the first curated exhibition I have see that has been so clearly described in English that I have been able to fully understand it! How ironic that it was in Taiwan! Another delightful bonus feature of this free museum is that visitors are free to take photographs of the artworks at their own discretion. Nice!
The second and third exhibition we walked around were less interesting to me, and were concerned more with written and moving images, so I will skip over the details. However, the final exhibition was a collection of works in gouache and also pigment on silk by a Taiwanese artist named Zhou Yu-Ting. The pieces were produced in the 1990s mostly, and reflected the vibrant and delicate features of the diverse Taiwanese flora and fauna, as well as the rugged landscapes and religious deities. I really found the methods used by the artist intriguing, and I would like to know more about how this method is carried out. The colours were so vivid, and the detail very fine!
When we left the exhibitions it was nearing dusk, so we walked down the palm lined pedestrianised central reservation of Wuquan 3rd Street across from the museum. The road opened out into a grassy area with western style restaurants on both the right, and a number of shops and more restaurants on the left. Unable to decide on a place to eat that met our needs (we had been joined by a second hostel staff member at this point) I moved the party into an extremely eye-friendly looking two storey yoga store and studio, named Easyoga, which I now know is the brand name for LuLuLemon in Asia. The fact that I might be able to buy sportswear in Taiwan that can accommodate my long legs was a reasonable compensation for the increasingly apparent fact that I might not get to Tung Hai Art Street. Fortunately, my comrades decided on a Japanese style restaurant and we all filled up on chicken and rice, before waiting for an hour at the wrong bus stop for a bus to take us to Tung Hai. In the meantime we were exchanging heavy loads of language and cultural information about our home nations. I found out about a number of places that I could add to my list of places I would like to visit.
Some hours later, after a journey that included a brisk March through Taichung to find a BRT station we arrived in Art Street, just as the rain started to fall. I couldn't tell if enthusiasm was waning, or energy, but the spirits of my team mates seemed to dwindle. The street is quite narrow, cobbled, tree lined and quaint. It is reminiscent of artsy areas in seaside towns in the UK. I wanted to wander around so much, but it seemed like the rain had put a damper on the other girls’ spirits. That is until we walked down a side street to visit a homeopathic shop selling soaps made with essential oils. Soon the others were deeply engrossed in a long conversation with the shop owner - it seemed to include trying every product in the shop!
I saw my chance to explore and walked out into the cooling air. In one direction I found a lamp shop selling 1920’s style art-deco stained glass lampshades. In the other direction I encountered clothes shops and a tiny handmade cookie store. I entered the store – I was hungry – and they quickly made their offerings of free samples. I could have bought them all – but I managed to walk away with only three bags of biscotti type cookies; two chocolate types – one without flour, and one flavoured with rose and white chocolate. I returned to the soap shop to find the others still covered in the organic samples, and intently conversing with the shop owner. His friend, offered me a shandy (from Poland!) and a seat at the large dining table in the centre of the store. I accepted. My feet were tired, I was hungry, and an ice cold shandy was definitely welcome! After about 30 minutes of chatting, and various members of the group leaving and joining us, we set out again to find a bus that would take us back to the hostel.
That night I drank orange juice and ate Pizza Hut pizza, and chatted away with new friends. I found the whole experience to be surprisingly busy and the hostel to be incredibly friendly an accommodating, despite the language barriers. I am so pleased to have stayed at this place, and can highly recommend it to anyone looking for a quiet place to rest their head in Taichung. And… regarding Pizza Hut in Taiwan – it’s better here than in the UK by a long mile! They have ditched the sour cream and garlic dip (which I admittedly love) for a spicy chilli powder, which is actually a pretty special switch up!
The next part of my stay involved a teacher training event which, although very enjoyable for me, is probably not the most engaging material for a travel blog post… so I’ll leave that out…
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