Park Han-sol reports on Korea's financial regulators, along with fintech and insurance. She previously wrote about the art world, from biennales and exhibitions to fairs and auctions, with a focus on Seoul and the figures shaping the scene. Before joining The Korea Times, she spent a year at ABC News' Seoul bureau, contributing to coverage of major Asia-Pacific events.
Inside Taichung Green Museumbrary, where art and reading breathe together
Taichung Green Museumbrary in central Taiwan, designed by SANAA Architects / Courtesy of Taichung Art Museum
By Park Han-sol
Designed by Pritzker-winning SANAA, museum-library complex opens as Taiwan's top cultural project this year
TAICHUNG, Taiwan — “The architecture is full of insides and outsides. You’re constantly stepping out, then back in again,” said Korean artist Haegue Yang after walking through the newly opened Taichung Art Museum, part of Taichung Green Museumbrary in central Taiwan.
Here, any attempt to draw a firm boundary between exterior and interior quickly loses meaning, a truth written into the buildings’ facades.
Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architecture firm SANAA, the complex comprises eight cubic structures of varying sizes, each wrapped in a veil of metal mesh that lets sunlight and breeze seep through. Once inside, visitors are invited to drift along winding pathways, staircases, ramps and skybridges, moving freely from one cube to the next.
External view of Taichung Green Museumbrary, which comprises eight cubic structures of varying sizes, each wrapped in a veil of metal mesh. Courtesy of Taichung Art Museum
That blurring extends beyond form to the building’s very function. The complex is, quite boldly, both an art museum and a public library — a place where looking and reading are deliberately entwined.
Taichung Green Museumbrary, built on a former military airfield-turned-park, is widely regarded as Taiwan’s most significant cultural development of 2025. The project marks the island’s latest effort to elevate its international profile in the arts.
Its location in Taichung, Taiwan’s second-largest city, also nudges visitors away from the capital of Taipei, which has long been the island’s cultural center and host of the Taipei Biennial. Located roughly two hours from the capital by car or high-speed rail, Taichung is already home to institutions like the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and the Asia University Museum of Modern Art.
The reading area of Taichung Public Library / Courtesy of Taichung Art Museum
“The Taichung Art Museum is the city’s first municipal museum. With this role, our focus is on the art histories of central Taiwan. At the same time, we hope to deepen international collaborations with institutions from around the world,” said Lai Yi-Hsin, the museum’s director.
That ambition — to pair “international flair with the groundedness in locality,” as Yang put it — is already apparent in the institution’s inaugural public commission, which invited Yang alongside Taiwanese artist Michael Lin.
Yang’s “Liquid Votive — Tree Shade Triad,” her tallest installation to date, rises as a 24-meter-tall “tree” suspended upside down. Working with her signature venetian blinds, along with LED tubes and laser light, she reimagines sacred trees long revered across Asia as communal guardians. Nearby, Lin’s floral-patterned “Processed” unfolds across the flat roofs of two cylindrical “glass bubbles” in the lobby.
Installation view of "A Call of All Beings: See You Tomorrow, Same Time, Same Place" / Courtesy of Taichung Art Museum
In addition to these two large-scale commissions, visitors are greeted by the opening exhibition, “A Call of All Beings: See You Tomorrow, Same Time, Same Place.”
Featuring works by more than 70 artists from over 20 countries, the show draws on the museum’s collection and an array of newly commissioned pieces. Together, they trace how relationships between humans and nature have been imagined and reshaped over time, in dialogue with the museum’s own natural, urban and historical surroundings.
The presentation moves fluidly across generations. Works by 20th-century masters of central Taiwan such as Chen Ting-Shih and Wang Ching-Shuang, which quietly examine human-nature entanglements, are shown alongside contemporary installations that extend those inquiries into new forms. Among them is Chen Yin-Ju’s “Evocative of Mountains and Seas,” an immersive reconstruction of mythical creatures recorded in a 2,000-year-old Chinese bestiary. Visitors move through a sensorial landscape of sound, scent and softly illuminated text, as ancient imagery is translated into a contemporary, embodied experience.
Installation view of "A Call of All Beings" / Courtesy of Taichung Art Museum
Installation view of "A Call of All Beings" / Courtesy of Taichung Art Museum
Pieces by international artists further unsettle fixed distinctions between the human and the natural. Joan Jonas’ bamboo paper kites hover in space, their fragility animated by air. Adrien Tirtiaux’s “Post-Museum Evidences (the Drill)” disrupts the galleries much more forcefully: a massive drill pierces a hallway and two exhibition rooms, exposing the layers of concrete, insulation and steel beneath the museum’s surfaces. The building itself thus becomes part of the work, its materials turned into a register of memory.
Accessibility and disability are also central concerns of the exhibition. Korean artist Seung Hyun Moon’s “On Thin and Transparent Things” is a video performance made during the museum’s construction, in which three performers, including Moon himself, move slowly through unfinished galleries. Born with cerebral palsy, Moon draws on his own experience of navigating spaces not designed with disabled bodies in mind. Amid dust and scaffolding, the three trace subtle waves and vibrations, expressing how human bodies interact with architecture in flux.
A still from Moon Seung-hyun's "On Thin and Transparent Things" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist
Alongside these pieces is an archival display of photographs of American author and disability rights advocate Helen Keller, as well as early original sketches for Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince” — a story often read as an allegory of alienation and alternative ways of being in the world.
“A Call of All Beings,” which opened on Saturday, runs through April 12, 2026.