Visiting the Chiayi Art Museum is like taking a journey back through time and space. Works like Chen Cheng-po’s Looking Towards Chiayi and Lin Yu-shan’s Scenery of Chuluo are back in their hometown. Meanwhile, the architects deftly used a wooden exterior wall to connect with the history of the City of Wood. Standing within the museum, you seem to hear the whispers of historic sites, paintings, wooden structures, and time.

Architects Huang Ming-wei (right) and Wang Ming-hsien (left) combined old structures with a new one to create the Chiayi Art Museum, elegantly lending new vitality to a historic site.

Reflecting the City of Wood

The Chiayi Art Museum (CAM) is located on a tri­angu­lar city block formed by Zhongshan Road, Guang­ning Street and Lanjing Street.

There are three structures on the site. One is the former Chiayi branch of the Monopoly Bureau of the Japanese colonial government, built in 1936 and today listed as a municipal historic site; another is an alcohol warehouse built in 1954; and the third is a warehouse for alcohol and tobacco products, rebuilt in the 1980s. The architectural team responsible for renovating these into the CAM, which included Huang Ming-wei and Wang Ming-hsien, had the clever idea of placing a triangular glass structure on the grounds to link together these three buildings from different eras.

The designer of the Monopoly Bureau office building was the Japanese architect Sutejiro Umezawa. Born in Ishikawa Prefecture, Umezawa came to Taiwan to take a job in 1911, leaving the island only in 1955. He gave the best years of his life to Taiwan, and left a lifetime of works behind him, including the Songshan Tobacco Factory of the Monopoly Bureau (today the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park), the Hayashi Depart­ment Store in Tainan, and the offices and dormitory of the Tainan Police Agency (today Tainan Art Museum Building 1), all buildings from the era of Japanese rule.

“This building [the Chiayi branch of the Monopoly Bureau] can be considered an example of eclecticism, marking a transitional period between classical and modern styles,” explains Huang Ming-wei. The locations of the entryway lobby and the interior stairwells go against the classical emphasis on centrality and sym­metry, offering a thought-provoking additional element of interest.

One of the main focal points of the renovation work was the new façade. The structure of the alcohol and tobacco products warehouse was not earthquake-resistant enough, so the architects tore down the concrete outer wall and replaced it with cross-laminated timber. On the one hand this made the structure lighter, improving its seismic resistance, while at the same time the wood makes the interior space warmer in winter and cooler in summer, meeting the current demand for energy-saving buildings with lower carbon emissions. “Another reason we used a great deal of wood was that we hoped to draw a connection to the flourishing wood industry in Chiayi back in the era when it was called the City of Wood,” says Wang Ming-hsien. At another corner, the architects deliberately created a curved wall shape to echo the curved corner of the historic building, which is a nod of respect from the modern-­day architects to their Japanese predecessor.

This drawing shows how the addition of a triangular space has linked together three previously unconnected buildings from different eras to form the Chiayi Art Museum.

Reinventing the museum entrance

Another major aspect of the renovation was the addition of a triangular glass hall.

Looked at from a bird’s-eye view, the original three structures occupied two sides of the triangular grounds without being connected to each other, forming an oddly shaped space behind them. The architects cleverly inserted a high-­ceilinged transparent triangular structure into this space, which not only increases the area available for exhibitions but also links to the special exhibition space in the alcohol warehouse, while turning the fragmentary grounds into a plaza. “When we added the triangular hall, this linked together the group of structures, and the plaza took on a uniform direction­ality.” As Huang Ming-wei explains, the team imagined that “the flow of the museum would be improved if they were to turn the plaza into the main entrance.”

The entranceway to the Monopoly Bureau office building was originally on Zhongshan Road, right up against the traffic of a major thorough­fare. Today the entrance has been re­located to the shady and verdant plaza, which offers a space to breathe and relax before entering the museum. Meanwhile the glass façade has become the new face of the museum.

In adding this 12-meter-high space, the architects didn’t want the line of sight to be obstructed by columns, so they used laminated wood to make curved, “fish-belly” shaped beams to support the roof, with different lengths depending upon the size of the space to be spanned, so that they look like a school of fish frolicking under the ceiling. “We also made them fish-belly shaped in hopes of showing the beautiful supple­ness of the wood,” says Huang. It is only when you ­enter the ­museum and take the stairs to the second floor that you discover the vastness and breadth of the high-ceilinged space. Huang was asked why they didn’t create a space that opened all the way from the ground to the fourth floor. The two archi­tects agree that if they had done that, “there would be no sense of variety when you move between different floors.”

A 12-meter-high space was added to the second floor of the Chiayi Art Museum. Under the ceiling of the new space you can see “fish-belly” shaped beams made of laminated wood, which show off the wood’s flexible beauty.

A community-oriented museum

Museum director Nicole Lai admits that she was in crisis mode after taking over the job, because she worried that ordinary citizens would not come into the museum, and was ­concerned about what conception the people of Chiayi had of what a museum should be. Through a consensus-­building workshop, she came to understand that the expectations of local people toward the ­museum were very much connected to “daily life.” “To the citizens of Chiayi, a museum isn’t 100% an arts space. The things they expected the museum to do were not purely cultural and arts activities,” says Lai, explaining the differ­ence between Chiayi and metropolitan areas. These perceptions were passed along to the designers thinking about the museum’s brand image, who proposed the “+1” idea. “If we want to operate a museum in Chiayi, it cannot simply be 100% exhibition space. With this +1 brand (with +1 being a near homophone in Chinese for ‘Chiayi’), what we are hoping for is that all citizens will enter the museum and find value-added.”

This building, formerly belonging to the Monopoly Bureau of the Japanese colonial government, was designed by Sutejiro Umezawa. No pillars support the canopy that projects outward nearly four meters from the building, and an abundance of windows gives the façade an intriguing appearance.

Curatorial skills required

While working hard to deal with and link up with the community, Lai also constantly wondered: “When this city has a museum, how can it avoid being confined to local artistic culture? How will it be able to inject a vari­ety of different energies into the locality? How can it drive the aesthetics of the city?”

During its preparatory period, the CAM felt the weight of local residents’ expectations, and to date it has already received donations of works by local Chiayi painters such as Chen Cheng-po, Lin Yu-shan, Chang Yi-hsiung, Liu Sin-lu, and Lin Guo-zhi. But as a newly established museum with an insufficient permanent collection, the CAM needs to rely on the ability of curators to borrow resources from other places. “Through planning of exhibitions we can define the identity of the museum. As a result of exhibitions the museum can set roots in the community, while at the same time broadening the local perspective. This can also be what makes the CAM’s exhibitions unique,” Lai explains.

Lai is not only the museum director, she is also one of the most outstanding and active of the younger genera­tion of independent curators, who are adept at telling stories through exhibitions. The first exhibition at the CAM was “Re-visiting Landscape,” which explored the trends in landscape painting over the past century but also extended to include the psycho­logical landscapes of contemporary works of art. Besides displaying works by the older generation of Chiayi painters like Chen Cheng-po and Lin Yu-shan, Lai also specially invited artists who grew up in Chiayi but who in recent years have rarely been active locally to come back to show their works. “The CAM must bring together local artists, becoming a platform for local artistic talent.” Lai points out that the themes of the exhibitions in the first year after the museum’s opening have all been closely connected to slices of Chiayi’s art history, and have incorpor­ated special features of the city. These shows have organized and presented Chiayi’s artistic heritage and reflected its local arts and culture as well as its overall conditions.

The architects relocated the entrance so that a glass curtain wall is now the new face of the museum.

Not a typical art museum

“This is a non-typical art museum,” says Huang Ming-wei. “Here we start with a sense of respect for the historic site before we define the identity of the museum, rather than the other way round.”

During the early preparatory period, the Chiayi City Government defined the CAM as being “small but beautiful.” With its historic site, this complex is a case study of the re-use of old structures. Although it does not cover a vast area, it is conveniently located, and it seems as if the CAM has simply materialized in a space that has long been part of daily life for the citizens of Chiayi. While “globalization” and “getting in step with the world” are slogans that are widely bandied about today, the Chiayi Art Museum is community-oriented and is getting in step with local cultural history. Most importantly, it inspires the hope that it will have a “+1” ripple effect on the city.      

The elegant terrazzo staircase in the historic building.

The vertical staircase, with its clean and simple lines, connecting the floors in the exhibition hall.

A corner of the museum displays a work by graffiti artist Candy Bird.

The “City of Paintings” meets the “City of Wood” in the Chiayi Art Museum.

Museum director Nicole Lai uses her curatorial skills to borrow resources from other places and define the identity of the museum through exhibitions.

When night falls and the lights go on at the Chiayi Art Museum, you can clearly see the lines of the high-ceilinged space with its wooden structure. The museum has brought some new stardust into the city.