Taiwan turns on the culture

Acrobats perform incredible dances. Photos by Charmian Smith.
Acrobats perform incredible dances. Photos by Charmian Smith.
A giant mechanical flower, surrounded by leaf-thin loudspeakers, opens and closes to symbolise...
A giant mechanical flower, surrounded by leaf-thin loudspeakers, opens and closes to symbolise the diurnal cycle.
Taiwanese  comic opera performers enthral children at the  National Centre for Traditional Arts.
Taiwanese comic opera performers enthral children at the National Centre for Traditional Arts.
The remarkable Lanyang Museum has been built to resemble the local tilting escarpments, water and...
The remarkable Lanyang Museum has been built to resemble the local tilting escarpments, water and chequerboard of fields.

From exquisite porcelain and ancient bronzes to kitsch damper babies, from exotic Chinese opera to the glamorous film industry, Charmian Smith experiences a whirlwind of Taiwanese culture and discovers an unusual artistic goal.

There's a marked contrast between the restrained aesthetic of the centuries-old porcelain and bronzes in the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, on the one hand, and the extravagant make up and costumes of traditional Chinese opera or the cacophony of colour and smell in a temple, on the other.

Add to that the cute modern kitsch of the damper babies sold as souvenirs in Taipei 101, said to be the world's second tallest tower, sophisticated modern art, architecture and electronics, and the glamorous face of the modern Taiwanese film industry.

A week-long trip to the island and fleeting visits to attractions is no way to understand a country, but it can provide a few snapshots of Taiwan's diverse and colourful culture, and a visit organised by the Government Information Office provided many striking snippets.

At the National Centre for Traditional Arts in Yilan County, we caught a lively comic Taiwanese opera about some sea creatures, including a pretty shrimp, and a bouncy jellyfish.

The dancing and singing held visiting groups of school children enthralled.

This complex - a cross between a theme park, a museum and gallery, craft workshops and an educational institution, with a hotel attached - is a response to the realisation that traditional arts and crafts don't appeal to the younger generations brought up in an electronic world.

It's also part of the resurgence of interest in Taiwanese traditions, as opposed to those of wider China.

A replica 1920s street houses folk art and craft shops, selling everything from homemade soaps to exquisite puppets, handmade joss sticks and traditional preserves, such as candied fruits.

There are boat rides on the river, a wetland reserve, a relocated 19th-century scholar's house, an ancestral shrine, a stage and a colourful temple.

The exhibition hall displayed works of art symbolising longevity, fortune and prosperity, as part of the centennial celebrations of the founding of the Republic of China in 1912. The Chinese love symbols and linking meanings, numbers, and words that sound similar, especially when they have auspicious meanings.

This symbolism permeates all traditional Chinese art from painting to architecture to food and festivals.

Symbols for longevity are numerous - among them peonies, peaches, cranes, bats, deer, pine trees, and Shoushen the god of longevity, recognisable by his short stature, long wispy beard and bulbous bald head, who carries a peach and a knotted staff with a pumpkin tied to it.

In contrast, up the road is the remarkable Lanyang Museum, shaped like a tilted pyramid and faced with stone of different colours and textures to resemble the local tilting escarpments, water and chequerboard of fields.

It was designed by leading Taipei architect Kris Yao and opened in October 2010.

Its stunning exhibitions tell the stories of the Langyang Plain, an alluvial plain surrounded on three sides by forested mountains and on the fourth by the Pacific Ocean, and the peoples who live there: the indigenous Atayal in the mountains; the Kavalan tribe who inhabited the watery plains; and the Han Chinese who moved into the area in the late 18th century, forcing the Kavalan people to move south.

Back in Taipei, we filed briefly into the Performing Arts Academy theatre where members of the resident acrobatic troupe tied themselves in knots, bent impossibly backwards, kept a dozen bowls balancing on poles or formed four-storey human pyramids to amaze and delight the audience.

These graduates of the academy had studied for eight to 10 years, either in dance and acrobatics or in music and opera.

A quick tour of the museum above the theatre revealed some of the conventions of the elaborate Beijing opera.

What looks to us like an angry red-faced demon actually symbolises a brave and loyal character.

On the other hand, a white-faced character is sinister and treacherous, green is surly and stubborn, yellow or blue angry, while a black face indicates honesty and frankness.

At the other end of the aesthetic scale are the kitsch damper babies, created to publicise the remarkable wind damper suspended between the 88th and 89th floors of Taipei 101.

The 660-ton sphere mitigates the swaying of the 508m tower in high winds and earthquakes, but the bouncy damper babies have a life of their own and come in colours with their own "personalities", souvenirs and website.

The National Palace Museum in Taipei is remarkable not only for its collections, some of the best pieces acquired by Chinese emperors over many centuries, but also for the story of how they came to Taiwan.

It was originally set up in 1925 in the Forbidden City in Beijing after the last emperor was overthrown in 1911.

However, when the Japanese invaded in 1931 many of the finest treasures were packed and shipped south for safety. In 1948, after almost two decades of war and revolution, 2972 crates made it to Taiwan, only about a quarter of the crates originally sent from Beijing, but they were said to contain the best pieces.

Even so, the museum, built in 1965 and extended several times since, houses more than 670,000 artworks from more than 8000 years of Chinese history.

In an hour and a-half's tour, a guide managed to give us an insight into some of the ceramics and bronzes and a rushed view of one or two other treasures.

One of her comments, that earlier generations considered the most important goal of an artist was to create an auspicious meaning, pulled into focus what others had been saying about traditional Chinese art and its symbolism.

It's difficult to say whether it still applies, as the few contemporary art exhibitions I saw in Taipei appeared to be exploring some of the same themes and issues as elsewhere in the world.

The Pavilion of Dreams was harder to understand although it delighted with its clever technology, dream-like images and soundscapes, and feel-good commentaries.

The idea, according to the information, is to make visitors feel they are part of nature and that everything is interconnected in our environment, but it aims to do so without anything natural.

It was created by artists and engineers using advanced, often interactive, technologies developed in Taiwan.

In the opening hall sound came from ultra-thin, leaf-shaped flexible loudspeakers and accompanied a huge mechanical flower on the ceiling opening and closing to symbolise the diurnal or annual cycle. Further on, we waved at interactive liquid crystal panels to "make" native plants grow or open their flowers.

A jaw-dropping circular theatre with 360 degree film that moved up and down and around, also included ultra wideband sensing technology to detect our breathing and activate software that "grew" a sapling into a tree.

We had to chose a topic - health, love, spiritual matters, business or family - to make a wish on, scanned our interactive bracelets at various stations through the pavilion and at the end an individual fortune was printed out for us.

I came away filled with images of technicolour plants and rows of plastic shapes "dancing" to lights and sound, but little wiser about the way we really interact with nature.

There was also a nagging question that if I hadn't waved or breathed at the plants as requested, would the image still have "grown"?

The main focus of this Government Information Office trip to Taiwan was the 48th annual Golden Horse Awards Ceremony, the island's equivalent of the Oscars for Chinese language films.

Taiwan does glamour as well as anyone and better than many, with gorgeously-clad stars arriving on a red carpet at the awards at the Performing Arts Centre in Hinschu City.

Taiwan's film industry is in the ascendancy after a period of decline, with a new wave of film-makers producing more commercially focused films.

Local films represent 10% to 20% of the total box office in Taiwan, something that would have been unbelievable a decade ago, according to Tony Ong, deputy minister for the Government Information Office.

One of the most talked-about films in Asia at present and winner of a Golden Horse for the best feature film, although it is yet to be released in the West, is Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, by Wei Te Sheng.

It tells the story of the indigenous Seediq tribe's heroic struggle against brutal Japanese colonisers and their subsequent massacre in 1930.

Not only does it bring the Wushi incident, which had been relegated to a couple of lines in Taiwanese history books, into graphic - and bloody - detail, it also opens a door on Taiwan's indigenous history.

It all adds up to Taiwan now viewing itself, culturally anyway, as a place with its own history and traditions, rather than a little off-shore China, in much the same was as New Zealand has developed its own cultural identity over the past half century and shed its cultural identification with Britain.

Charmian Smith travelled to Taiwan as a guest of the Taiwan Government Information Office.

 

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