From the podium of the United Nations General Assembly and the facades of the pillars at the Arrivals Hall at Taoyuan International Airport to the chairs in our elders’ homes and the tiles on sidewalks, there is a green material—a little bit old-fashioned, a little bit nostalgic—that comes from Taiwan: serpentine.
Yingge in New Taipei City is famous for its ceramics, but less well known is that there was once a robust pottery industry in Nantou, dating back over 200 years to the Jiaqing reign period (1796–1820) of the Qing Dynasty, and focusing on objects for daily use. Today a small number of ceramics makers, including Lin Yung-sheng, continue this tradition.
Ceramic artist Su Cheng-li’s Li Jin Kiln is one of the Taiwan Crafts Workshops endorsed by the National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute.
What would a fashion mashup of images from traditional Taiwanese banquets, general stores, Taoist spirit-journey rituals, free-diving fisherwomen and the Yanshui Beehive Fireworks Festival, as well as Japanese kabuki theater, look like?
Constantly surprising and delighting, Kuo Wei of the Taiwanese fashion brand INF revels in drawing creative inspiration from a diverse range of cultural phenomena.
What is that tree? A pomelo? A mandarin orange?
As children, two brothers argued about a certain sapling in Kinmen’s historic Guqu community. The elder said it was a pomelo tree, while the younger insisted it was a mandarin orange tree. The answer turned out to be—grapefruit! This childhood memory is an ideal metaphor for the brothers today: Both are rooted in the soil of Kinmen, but each has his own identity.
In the past, transitional justice in Taiwan focused mainly on victims of the February 28 Incident and the White Terror. But in recent years, following declassification of government documents and the completion of oral histories, a forgotten piece of history has been rediscovered: the restrictions that the authoritarian regime imposed on overseas dissidents, known as the “blacklist.”
The Trustworthy AI Dialog Engine (TAIDE), a chatbot under development by the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), is being trained on uniquely Taiwanese corpora, so that its information pertaining to Taiwan is correct and comprehensive. Industry, government, and academia have used the TAIDE model to develop applications in such fields as agriculture, healthcare, and smart manufacturing. In the process, they have made great strides toward the development of sovereign AI.
Waiting Room B5 at Taoyuan International Airport is adorned with painted bas-reliefs of iconic Taiwanese images such as the black-faced spoonbill and the Taiwan blue magpie. In Taichung International Airport’s arrivals concourse there is a wall painted with a vibrant street scene representing one of Taiwan’s popular Mazu pilgrimages. Taipei’s Songshan Cultural and Creative Park features a mural called Time in Wisps of Smoke, which commemorates the site’s former life as a tobacco plant. These pu
Visiting the hometown of “Jam Queen” Ke Ya in Shengang, Changhua County, you’re immediately greeted by powerful winds—a local specialty. In 2019, those winds reached international shores as this daughter of Shengang took the jam world by storm, sweeping competitions in the UK and Japan. This triumph was Ke Ya’s way of translating Taiwan’s terroir, its fruits, and its artisan spirit into something the world could taste—making jam a microcosm of the island’s essence.
As we hike with a group of scientists along the banks of the Hapen River in Yilan’s Fushan Botanical Garden, suddenly a clearing in the valley comes into view. Standing upright on a platform are over 200 neatly laid out metallic antennas, shaped rather like two-dimensional Christmas trees. At first glance they look like an array of magical artifices in some sort of fantasy novel.
