Hong-Gah is not the easiest museum to approach. Located on the 11th floor, it’s easy to miss if you aren’t paying attention. Frankie Su, the museum’s director, jokes that Hong-Gah Museum does not have a ­beautiful, photogenic exterior. It also doesn’t have a wide-open space large enough to hold big events. Other than guarding its “turf” and planning one exhibition after another, how does an exceedingly low-key museum like Hong-Gah attract visitors?

Hong-Gah’s arrival in Beitou

When discussing Hong-Gah, we should begin with the entrepreneur named Andrew Chew. Established more than 20 years ago by Chew, the museum gets its name from his father, Chew Hong-gah.

A fan of the arts, Andrew Chew is also a renowned art collector when not at his day job. Active in the art world, he decided to open a space where arts enthusiasts could gather. From this salon-­inspired space arose the forerunner of the Hong-Gah Museum.

Having begun his career in the electronics industry, Chew pays particular attention to the technological applications of art. Accord­ingly, Hong-Gah is actively engaged in organ­izing video art exhibitions. The mu­seum’s biennial international video art ­ex­hibi­­­tion is a major arts event.

However, video art still does not have mainstream appeal like the more popular art forms of oil painting and sculpture.

Building public support through schools

It’s hard to get people to go to an art museum, yet much easier for the museum to go out to them.

Hong-Gah Museum has prided itself on being a “community art museum” from the very beginning, and is devoted to the instruction of aesthetics. It attempts to utilize local resources to create reasons for people visit an art museum.

For example, early on the museum partnered with Peitou Culture Foundation (“Peitou” is another spelling of “Beitou”) to hold the “Citizens’ Art Exhibition,” in­viting local self-taught artists to the exhibit and placing no restrictions on the art media or thematic content of works submitted. This greatly raised the museum’s profile.

Later on, the museum kept Beitou as the core theme, and held an exhibition every year while also inviting independent curators, which helped to keep clear themes and objectives for the exhibitions.

The “Community Art Empowerment Program” launched in 2014 is an example of this. Funded by Hong-Gah Museum and Peitou Culture Foundation, local ele­ment­ary schools made proposals for exhibitions and implemented them all on their own. When the art pieces entered the museum, the curators managed the layout and planning.

Since the elementary schools enroll students according to a school attendance zone system, the students’ homes are all close to the museum. Thus, putting the works of schoolkids on display got many parents to come visit the museum.

In this way, by appealing to both art connoisseurs and regular people, the museum gradually further raised its profile.

But new problems ensued in the next phase of the museum’s operations. Curator Zoe Yeh observes, “Teachers would be transferred. Even if the teachers had a good partnership with the museum, transfers meant losing a point of contact. Also, partnering with elementary schools meant the target audience would be relatively homogenous, comprising mostly parents. Most of them would show up to an exhibition once, but they rarely came a second time.”

Yeh, who joined the museum team five years ago as an in-house curator, reformulated the program so that the curation rights went back to the museum, and cur­ators were in charge of the theme. Based on this theme, the curators would negotiate for different artists to go to the schools. The range of students was expanded to include preschoolers all the way to primary and middle school students, and the program was also opened up to elderly people in senior citizen learning centers.
 

Unveiling the Beitou life

Hong-Gah Museum then focused on developing “Bei­tou studies,” echoing a trend towards local studies that has gained popularity all over in the past decade. Different resources and approaches such as historical documents, field surveys, and game play have helped people notice the texture and beauty of local life, and take an interest in their homeland.

Small private art museums have their own advantages. For one, they are unfettered by the policies large-scale public art museums must follow. They also do not need to strive to include all art forms and media out of concern for comprehensive coverage. Hong-Gah Museum has a clear goal to advance Beitou studies, and through their choice of expo themes, they are able to discover, chronicle, and enhance the spirit and look of life in Beitou one step at a time.

For example, the theme of the 2019 exhibition “Beitou Local Flavors Collecting Project” was “flavors.” The cur­ators invited the Yanzhi Pickling Club to make three fermented dishes using Beitou products. The “Weed Day” art group used 19 types of wild weeds to create a weed tea formula. A cauldron was used to make a “Witch’s Brew” in a salute to the legends of witches seen in the folklore of the local Ketagalan Aborigines.

This year the theme is “the body.” In addition to static artworks, there is also performance art in the form of dances and plays. For example, in the pottery classes given by the ceramic artist Peng Chun-rong at Datun Elementary School, the children draw on their observations of the movements of the body in daily life for inspiration to create works of ceramic art. It is also a nod to Beitou’s once-flourishing ceramic industry.

“Our promotion policies in the early stages involved inviting local residents to our museum. For the longer term, we need to go out into the community,” says Zoe Yeh, summing up the core principle of the exhibitions over the past decade. “By venturing outside the museum, we have actually inspired more people to come visit,” she says with some satisfaction.

Another story of the Ketagalan people

Since Beitou and the art museum are so deeply connected, “Beitou” has become the token by which people get to know the museum. In other words, if you fancy learning about a different side of Beitou, come to Hong-Gah Museum.

“In Search of Tiger’s Claw—Where are the Ketagalan People?” was the second expo featuring Beitou’s Ketagalan Aborigines in a three-year exhibition plan.

As the earliest rulers of Beitou, the Ketagalan people have seen their cultural heritage swept away in the torrent of history through forced migrations, land acquisitions, and assimilation into the incoming Han Chinese culture.

The critical event which led to the creation of the exhibi­tion occurred some years ago when the public cemetery for the Ketagalan people of Ki-Pataw (“the place of the witch”—the old Ketagalan name from which “Beitou” is derived) was expropriated by the city government to be turned into “Park 22.” The descendants of the local Ketagalan were not content to have their history violently erased, so they began a series of protests. In the end, although the name of the park was changed to “Ki-­Pataw Shan Tseng Chi Park,” the more than 50-meter-long history and culture corridor inside the park completely lacked any mention of the area’s indigenous people.

To dispel the anger of the Aborigines, Hong-Gah Museum was commissioned by the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs to retell the story of the Ketagalan in Beitou’s history by holding exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and the like.

For example, Baode Temple was an important place of faith for the Ketagalan of Ki-Pataw after they became sinicized, but faced a similar fate to the cemetery when it was torn down to build a metro station, creating a deep sense of grievance. “At the beginning, the temple elders were very reticent. They didn’t want to talk much about it, no matter what they were asked,” museum director Frankie Su recalls.

By having the museum curators and artists work untiringly to form amiable relations with the temple elders, the relocated temple not only became a crucial hub for historical documents, it is now also a key center for Hong-Gah Museum’s promotion of art education.

Artist Liang Ting-yu held a series of workshops at which the temple elders recounted local history and residents were invited to come and mold clay into sculptures representing “Baode Temple as they saw it.” Liang plans to digitize their works using 3D scanning and place replicas of them at the site of the original temple, and in the process ease some of the deep pain of its loss.

With aesthetics as the core, local studies as the path, and its deep local roots and rich culture, the existence of Hong-Gah has become a reason for enjoying life in Beitou.