From preservation to reuse
Having succeeded in preserving the mill itself, the question became what to do with it. "If we viewed it as a heritage site, it would forever be something to look at rather than use; the space would become lifeless," says Chiang. "The ideal approach was to incorporate the heritage of this representative of industrial civilization into the workaday structure of local residents' lives, to make it a part of community life."
Since 2001, the arts village established on the mill grounds in 2001 by the Kio-A-Thau Culture Society and the Kaohsiung County Cultural Affairs Bureau (CAB) has been sponsoring artistic and cultural activities and inviting local and foreign artists to live and work here as artists in residence.
"At the outset, everybody was wondering who'd be interested in coming to Chiaotou," recalls CAB director Wu Hsu-feng. But as word gradually got out, the Kio-a-thau Arts Village not only began building good relations with the townspeople, but also began to acquire a measure of international renown. In recent years, its artist-in-residence program has attracted the likes of the American artist Lexa Walsh and the French photographer Philippe Callandre, adding an international dimension to the distinctly localist character of the village.
"Arts villages typically attract 'shiftless people' like myself, who come by to chat over some drinks," says TV director Ko Shu-chin. In 2006, Ko, the ex-wife of director Lin Cheng-sheng and a longtime Taipei resident, decided to return home to Kangshan Township--just over ten minutes by car from Chiaotou--to work on a script. "At first, I found the lifestyle here really unfamiliar," she says. "I couldn't find any coffeeshops or bookstores, and there wasn't any art."
A friend brought her to Chiaotou, where she discovered that art and coffee weren't unique to urban centers. She soon became a regular visitor.
Like the young and old who regularly visited the mill, Ko soon became fast friends with the seemingly rustic but very sharp Chiang.
In February of this year, Ko and Chiang organized the Golden Sugarcane Film Festival, which drew the participation of 23 amateur filmmaking teams from Taiwan and abroad. Once registered, the teams finished up their scripts before spending a week in residence at the mill making their films. The result was a series of short films set in the mill, shot in digital video, and edited on computers.
"The old 32-millimeter standard made it hard to break into film," says Chiang. "Digital video has liberated filmmaking, making it both simpler and more democratic." The short films created for the next few years' festivals will ultimately constitute a video archive that will offer a portrait of the mill.
When Chiang met Ko Shu-chin (at right in the photo on the left), their caffeine-, alcohol- and cigarette-fueled discussions of literature gave rise to the February 2007 Golden Sugarcane Film Festival, which attracted 23 filmmaking teams from around the world.