Ministry of Culture Promotes Taiwan Independent Art Space Archive Project, Partners with AAA for Campus Outreach

(Central News Agency, Taipei, May 5) The Ministry of Culture, in partnership with Asia Art Archive (AAA) and the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB), is promoting the 'Taiwan Independent Art Space Archive Project.' This year, the project is specifically reaching out to different campuses to make more art archives visible.

According to a press release issued by the Ministry of Culture today, this project, initiated in 2022, systematically organizes and preserves important documents related to the development of contemporary art in Taiwan. Starting in May of this year, it has begun archival education and outreach at universities including Fu Jen Catholic University, National Taiwan University (NTU), National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), and Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA).

For example, in May, related outreach was conducted in courses such as 'Eurasian Contemporary Curatorial Studies' at Fu Jen's Graduate Institute of Museum Studies, and the general education course 'Museum Collection and Exhibition Practice.' At NTU's Department of Library and Information Science, the 'Introduction to Archival Studies' course also participated. On May 28, faculty and graduate students from NTNU's Department of Fine Arts visited the project office.

Furthermore, the results of the deepened collaboration between AAA and the master's and doctoral programs at TNUA's College of Fine Arts will be exhibited at C-LAB from June 6 to 14. The exhibition is titled 'Reenactment, and Those Unfinished Instructions,' inspired by the feeling of a 'system incompatibility' gap created by the temporal and spatial distance when confronting past artworks.

The Ministry of Culture stated that the goal of the 'Taiwan Independent Art Space Archive Project' is to help the public understand that art archives are not only an important medium for preserving history but also a core resource for re-understanding and interpreting the development of contemporary art in Taiwan.

Through collaboration with university courses, the project hopes to enable more young students to recognize the value of archival work and, through the close integration of research, exhibition, and practice, to continuously develop new ways of viewing and public discussion of Taiwan's art history. (Editor: Zhang Mingkun) 1150605