Calligrapher and painter Chu Chen-nan has the courage to venture beyond his comfort zone. As a mature artist, he plunged himself several times into unfamiliar environments in Europe and America to pursue knowledge and inspiration. His gentle and affectionate temperament belies a self-­scrutinizing soul ever yearning to transcend boundaries and attain new vistas. These strikingly vivid, if also paradoxical, personal traits have enabled him to breathe a distinctively modern vibe of untrammeled fre

At the 2021 New York Fashion Week, the Taiwanese brand oqLiq based its show on a 16th-century novel of myths, legends and fantasy called Creation of the Gods. This was combined with multimedia and virtual technology to stun the world with a fashion vocabulary derived from Taiwanese culture.

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.

When entering a temple in Taiwan, the first thing you’ll notice is a pair of “guards” painted on the door panels to welcome you. For Taiwanese, these door guards are a feature of everyday life, but as a first-time visitor, you may wonder just who they are.

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.