Near historic Wushi Harbor in northeastern Taiwan’s Yilan County, visitors are flocking to a new building in the shape of a black monocline rock formation, typical of the area, with large, oblique windows offering great views of the Pacific.
This is the architecturally stunning Lanyang Museum. Designed by renowned Taiwanese architect Kris Yao, the NT$1.1-billion (US$36-million) building has grabbed two design prizes since its completion, and become part of the worldwide trend for museum architecture to be a tourist attraction in and of itself, independent of what the museum holds inside.
“The building embodies our conception of Yilan as a cultural site nurtured by mountains, plains and the sea,” Lu Li-cheng, Yilan-born director of the National Museum of Taiwan History and the brains behind the Lanyang project, said in an interview Oct. 27.
The museum rises out of a wetland, another characteristic topographical feature. “Seen from afar, it also echoes the renowned offshore Guishan Island, a symbol of Yilan for people who are homesick for the area,” Lu said.
Anchored in the land and climate of Yilan, the museum was made possible by a communal identity with the region.
“It all started more than 20 years ago,” Lu said. “People in different parts of Yilan shared the same desire to preserve Yilan’s culture and ecology long before the museum came into being.”
In 1986, the Yilan County government planned to redevelop the shrinking Wushi port. At the urging of locals, however, the idea of preserving the wetlands near the harbor and turning the whole area into a museum base got the upper hand.
That was when Lu began to promote the concept of Yilan as a museum.
Yilan’s geography of plains surrounded by mountains on three sides and the ocean on the fourth makes it very suitable for agriculture, but cuts it off from other parts of Taiwan. These conditions have also given rise to an independent and hard-working people. They wanted a museum that would represent their unique locale and identity.
“Back then we had no idea what the museum ought to look like, but we were aware that a successful museum should not be vulnerable to policy and personnel changes. So we decided to rally existing local efforts in community empowerment, conservation of nature and cultural industries,” Lu explained.
The end of martial law in 1987 set loose a community empowerment movement that produced individuals and groups with the know-how to preserve local culture and history. The groundswell gained momentum through the 1990s as different people focused on particular fields or causes.
Networking around 20 local museums already in operation, the nonprofit Yilan Museums Association was formed in 2001, dedicated to establishing the Lanyang Museum through local knowledge and manpower.
YMA Chairman Hung Mei-fang recalled, “We began to learn that there were others like ourselves in Yilan, trying to exercise their professional skills to run different kinds of museums, all for the good of our home county. The Lanyang Museum project facilitated collaboration and the exchange of experience.”
Hung represents the Museum of Candied Fruits, based in Yilan City. The museum is also a candied fruit factory, producing preserves from locally grown kumquats. The facility exhibits the factory’s natural way of growing fruit and making sweets, while detailing the history of the fruit-processing industry, ongoing improvements to machinery and folk traditions relating to citrus fruits.
While members from the private sector are seeking to combine culture and industry, individual professionals and community organizations in various parts of Yilan have also been engaged in setting up themed museums, Hung said.
Baimi Community in Su-ao Township is a case in point. It has become a textbook case for repudiating a model of development imposed from above, one that led to severe pollution. By working together, community members revived traditional wooden clog manufacture, making it their trademark industry. The Baimi Wooden Clog Museum highlights the history and beauty of the craft.
Other communities are doing similar things. Dongshan Township’s Jenju Village highlights arts and crafts made with rice straw. The Wuweigang Eco-Community and Wild Bird Refuge, in Su-ao, preserves wetlands ecology.
Art museums set up by local artists include the Mary Leu Fine Arts Carving Gallery, showcasing gold sculpture, in Sanxing Township. The geometrically harmonious Chen Chung-tsang Museum, located in Dongshan Township and of the artist’s own design, exhibits Chen’s paintings and calligraphy.
The public sector has followed suit. A museum run by the Taiwan Water Corp. in Yuanshan Township, for example, houses a water purification facility dating from the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945).
A forest recreation park operated by the Luodong Forest District Office presents the history of logging on Taipingshan from Japanese times down to 1982, while at the same time promoting ecotourism.
Most notable of all, Yilan embraces the only museum and archive center recording the history of Taiwan’s social and democratic movements. The museum belongs to the Chilin Foundation, established in 1998 by Yilan-born Lin I-hsiung, former Democratic Progressive Party chairman. Lin is regarded as a seminal figure in Taiwan’s pursuit of democracy.
Another Yilan native who has returned home is Susan Lin, who in 2009 single-handedly brought together 40 artists from 10 countries for an arts festival in Jiaoxi Township, and is repeating the feat this year.
An established career woman who spent 30 years outside Yilan as curator of several arts and cultural events, Lin returned home two years ago, determined to give something back to the place that had nurtured her. With the arts festivals, she seeks to bring in cross-cultural inspiration for local artists and crafts masters.
Her efforts have crystallized in “The Beauty of Handmade Craft: Yilan’s Living Art Exhibition,” which is the Lanyang Museum’s first special exhibition. Orders for copies of some of the works on display were streaming in even before the museum’s official launch Oct. 16, Lin said.
While the Lanyang Museum traces Yilan’s history, geography, traditions and folk life, “it was created for people to experience, not to display dead things,” in the words of Lin Cheng-fang, a research fellow at the institution.
Watching children and adults check out Yilan’s geology and the ways people used to live in the very user-friendly four-story facility, one can be sure they will be moved to go from inside the museum out into the real world of contemporary Yilan.
As Lu put it, “The Lanyang Museum is like a door opening onto all the bounty of the county’s spreading Lanyang Plains.”
“The mutual support among the Lanyang Museum and the dozens of local museums will facilitate cultural preservation, tourism and local industry,” he said.
Hung agrees. “We hope visitors will go from Lanyang, the mother museum, to take a look at the smaller museums, glean local knowledge from community work and explore the area’s mountains and rivers.”
“Only out there can one really learn about the natural and cultural forces that shape Yilan,” she said. (THN)
Write to June Tsai at june@mail.gio.gov.tw