Chen Cheng-hsiung is the only Asian artist to have been conferred both a Lifetime Achievement in Art Award and a Lorenzo il Magnifico Award in two different years at the Florence Biennale. In 1999 he received both awards for his “Window” series, and in 2001 he was honored again for his “Digital Space” series.

In 2014, when Tsai Po-cheng’s Floating Flowers won the Audience Award and the Gauthier Dance/Stuttgart Theater Production Award at the International Competition for Choreographers Han­over, he became the only dancer to have come away with both big prizes at the event. In 2015 Tsai’s newly created work Hugin/Munin won the Burgos & New York International Choreo­graphy Competition and the Tanz Luzerner Theater Production Award at the Copenhagen International Choreo­graphy Competition. Then in 2017

Years ago artistic inspiration prompted both Lo Fang-yun and Chen ­Cheng-ting to travel more than 8000 kilometers from Taiwan to Germany. Having studied and worked there, they have combined their Taiwanese roots and German training in a new dance production called Unsolved, which explores profound questions of identity that were sharpened by their experiences abroad. The production is the result of years of creative experience and represents the artists’ journey of self-inquiry. It is also an ir

What happens when George Orwell’s novel 1984, a work of political allegory and satire, meets the play Three Sisters by Russian realist writer Anton Chekhov? At the end of 2017, Taiwan’s Shakespeare’s Wild Sisters Group and Japan’s Dai­nana­gekijo theater company endeavored to find the answer to that question when they staged their Note Exchange Vol. 2: 1984.

“Silverfish eat books,” explains Wu Jer-ruey. “If you’ve got enough books, they will come and gorge on them. Once that happens you are no longer your own master. You become the servant of the books, needing to look after them every day. In a sense, you become a servant of bugs.” Wu believes that when you are a paper conservator, simply having repair skills is not enough—you’ve got to continually read and research to extend your knowledge.

Lai Chih Hao likes to compare art restorers to doctors—and paintings in need of restoration to patients. Paintings, however, are silent patients unable to describe what ails them. It is the conservator’s job to examine them with the greatest care and prescribe the most efficacious treatment. “Compared with oil paintings in Europe, which are often three or four centuries old if not older, Taiwanese oil paintings are still very young,” Lai says.

The gu­qin is a seven-stringed fretless tradi­tional Chinese musical instrument in the zither family. In 2003, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization announced that the gu­qin and its music would be added to the organ­iza­tion’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

SJ Art and Conservation’s ­Guandu, Tai­pei workshop exudes quiet, its calming atmosphere reinforced by its white interior and by the gentle movements and whispers of staff members, who are busily restoring precious cultural artifacts.

It’s hard to define precisely what kind of creator Tsai Erh-ping is. He crosses the boundaries between ceramics, metalworking, painting, sculpture, and horti­culture. He is a sculptor, a gardener, and a jewelry designer. From the most exquisite and meticulous pieces of jewelry to the layout of a large-scale garden, he can make something wondrous out of nothing.

How is photography to escape from the outmoded and to find new possibilities in the experimental? The conceptual photo­grapher Li Hao refuses to be confined by the art’s traditional documentarian‡realist framework. Instead, he aims to probe its experimental potential.