Wandering Artists and Urban Renewal

On a drizzly late-fall afternoon, two farmers harvest rice in Taipei's ritzy Da-zhi area. Their activities feel out of place amidst the gleaming high rises, grid-like streets, and burgeoning construction of what some see as the most futuristic and least cordial part of the city.

Nearly 80 adults and children watch excitedly as the farmers cut the rice, bind the stalks together, and toss the sheaves onto a concrete embankment. A kinetic sculpture of a flock of egrets taking flight rises from a pool of water in the center of the nearby paddy. Stirred by the wind, it invites people to respond to the world around them by letting their spirits dance with the birds.

The sculpture is one of three by Japanese artist Susumu Shingu in-cluded in an exhibition called "The Wind Brings Light." The exhibition itself is the fifth in a series by the Museum of Tomorrow, an organization backed by the JUT Foundation for Arts and Architecture (JFAA), and also includes three concerts and family activities around the edges of the paddy. JFAA's parent organization, the JUT Group, is covering all the expenses associated with the space and events.

The foundation had held a similar event on the same piece of land, a nearly 70,000-square-foot plot worth over NT$4 billion, some three years ago. That event, a "landscape art project" entitled "Rice for Thoughts," aimed at re-illustrating the relationship between people and paddies, was created in conjunction with artist Lin Chuan-chu. Curator Sean Hu says that its objective was to alleviate the mental exhaustion of city dwellers by means of a temporary art project that sought to recreate the living environment of China's medieval literati. The plot's owners have chosen to keep it in rice for the last three years, even as the surrounding land has been developed. Aaron Lee, son of the JUT Group's owner, is the source of the project's "anti-development" logic.

(left) Casagrande Laboratory, a Finnish alternative architecture cooperative, used an idle piece of JUT Group land in Wanhua to demonstrate the concept of the Ruin Academy and recognize the gardeners growing veggies on tiny plots around Taipei. (middle, right) The Tamkang University Department of Architecture operates Dihua Street's 127 Gallery on behalf of the Taipei City Government. The structure's first floor is an exhibition space, while its second serves as a design incubator for young architects and designers. In the future, the space is also likely to be involved in Dihua Street community development.

JUT is a construction company that has made a name for itself by "improving the aesthetics of living spaces" and has in recent years expanded into furniture, foods and beverages, and art galleries. It established the foundation in early 2007 specifically to promote art exhibitions, performances, and discussion fora.

During September 2009's conference on The Dynamics of Art and Urban Transformation, organized by the Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Aaron Lee, the foundation's CEO, articulated the objective underlying JUT's involvement in the arts: "We hoped to move beyond a public-welfare model wherein corporations provide purely monetary support, and think instead on how to make the best use of all the strengths and resources of a corporation. We then realized that land that construction companies held in anticipation of development could serve as a basis for the foundation's development."

Lee explained that construction companies often have property sitting idle for two to three years while they gather together all the scattered rights to the plot and negotiate the complex urban reconstruction permitting process. "These idle spaces are useless to the construction companies that own them, but often make fantastic exhibition or performance spaces for artists. They may even serve as the inspiration or raw materials for works."

Lee has also made use of real estate developers' model units to create the Museum of Tomorrow: "The concept of the Museum of Tomorrow is a bit like that of a traveling circus, spreading happiness and a vision of a better tomorrow wherever it goes."

JFAA organized its first Museum of Tomorrow program in February 2007 on a piece of land on Civic Boulevard that JUT had just acquired from the National Property Administration. Lee forecast the property would be idle for at least three years while JUT handled the redevelopment paperwork, and used the old railway repair depot there to host two consecutive free exhibitions, the FLOWmarket and HAPPY LIVING, which drew some 40,000 visitors over a two-month period.

Lee says that JFAA deliberately divorces its events from sales promotions. For example, the site mentioned above remained idle for three years after the exhibitions, a period during which it was also made available to Chen Chieh-jen to shoot the film Military Court and Prison. Ads for homes on the site went up only after JUT had received a construction permit in the second half of 2010.

The Snails without Shells Alliance and other activist groups organized a series of "Citizens Need Green Spaces" activities aimed at opposing the chaos that Taipei's floor-area bonuses policy has created and at realizing their vision of a livable city. The events urged the city to make the temporary green spaces created by the policy permanent. The green space in the photo is a piece of public land on Roosevelt Road Section 3.

In the past, construction companies made occasional direct investments in the arts, but such acts were always aimed at a particular development. One other company besides JUT has been supporting the arts in a systematic fashion in recent years: Lead Jade Construction. Like JUT, it too has been deeply involved in redeveloping Taipei. (See "Art Flourishes Amidst Urban Redevelopment," p. 41)

The Taipei City Department of Urban Development has been promoting the "targeted" and "mobile" Urban Regeneration Station (URS, a play on "yours") since the start of 2010.

The Urban Redevelopment Office (URO) of the Taipei City Government, the program's primary organizer, refers to the program as "soft redevelopment." "Like acupuncture and moxibustion, it gets the city's 'stagnant qi' flowing again," says a URO official. The program's approach is quite different from the "tear down and rebuild" model of "hard redevelopment." In practice, the URO looks for suitable idle public lands and negotiates a flexible two-to-three-year use agreement with the property's manager (e.g. the National Property Administration or the Taiwan Railways Administration). During this period, the URO solicits proposals for the creative use of the land from private-sector charitable organizations.

The first batch of URS properties consisted of four sites, one of which was a privately owned townhouse located at 127 Dihua Street that was donated to the URO in exchange for tradable floor-area credits. To date, it is the only property to have been turned over to the city government in perpetuity. Operated by the Tamkang University Department of Architecture without any governmental subsidies, the site, now known as URS127, functions as a design gallery and as TKU's architecture incubator.

Hsu Yen-hsing, head of the URO's planning section, says that the objective of the URS is to "integrate local networks, incentivize creativity, and invigorate neighborhoods."

For example, the 4,150-square-meter Zhongshan Distribution Site occupies a great location and retains warehouses from the period just after the war. The city government initially designated it a creative incubator. But, having been idle for many years, the site was in very poor condition. "The local borough chief only asked that the city quickly remove the old structures and put in new high rises, thinking that this would raise nearby property values."

But when the URO brought in community planning experts and students from Taiwan and abroad for discussions and workshops, it succeeded in linking up with local networks. "When the borough chief who had been calling for demolition saw young people staying up all night working on drawings and plans, throwing themselves into serious discussions on how to revive businesses, he had a change of heart and began picturing a different kind of renewal," says Hsu.

(left) Casagrande Laboratory, a Finnish alternative architecture cooperative, used an idle piece of JUT Group land in Wanhua to demonstrate the concept of the Ruin Academy and recognize the gardeners growing veggies on tiny plots around Taipei. (middle, right) The Tamkang University Department of Architecture operates Dihua Street's 127 Gallery on behalf of the Taipei City Government. The structure's first floor is an exhibition space, while its second serves as a design incubator for young architects and designers. In the future, the space is also likely to be involved in Dihua Street community development.

The URO and construction companies' use of flexible, ad-hoc land-use measures to support the arts have left Taiwan's arts community both hopeful and apprehensive.

Wu Mali, an assistant professor with National Kaohsiung Normal University's Graduate Institute of Interdisciplinary Art, says with some regret that the search for space in the contemporary arts world is a constant process of "eviction" from standard arts spaces. To the disappointment of the contemporary arts community, rents at Taipei's Huashan Creative Park have gone through the roof since the facility was turned over to outside management, and both the Museum of Contemporary Arts Taipei and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum have taken their facilities in a more commercial direction. With the community now relying on the generosity of corporate donors for temporary digs, it is clear that our cultural policy has issues with the allocation of resources.

Wu also points out that while Taipei's urban redevelopment policy, which the city implemented via its hosting an international flora expo, appeared to be utilizing the arts to beautify the city, it was actually driven by the politics of space associated with issues such as urban redevelopment and infrastructure construction. "In addition to celebrating increased opportunities for commissions to do projects," argues Wu, "artists should also reflect on whether this wave of urban renewal is fair and just."

Wu is involved with the Organization of Urban Re-s (OURs), a group very critical of the city government's use of floor-area bonuses as an incentive to redevelopment. She notes that private builders had only to maintain a green space for two years to attain the bonuses, raising suspicions that public officials were acting on behalf of private interests. Huang Jui-mao, chairman of the board of OURs and an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at Tamkang University, says that abuse of floor-area bonuses to drive urban renewal has consequences, including encouraging both the construction of impersonal skyscrapers with maxed-out floor areas and the kind of convoluted backroom redevelopment negotiations that are likely to destroy trust within communities. Moreover, since redevelopment is primarily occurring in Taipei's wealthiest areas and resulting in the construction of luxury apartments, it is leading to the further economic segregation and polarization of our urban spaces.

Who plants crops on pricey land in Taipei's Dazhi area? If you drop by the cargo container/visitor center next to the field you'll learn that the field is actually a landscape-art project entitled "The Wind Brings Light." Sponsored by the JUT Group, the project also includes three works by Japanese artist Susumu Shingu.

Faced with public criticism, Taipei's URO responded by stating that the creation of temporary green spaces and the reuse of old buildings prior to redevelopment "produce demonstrable positive benefits to the community during the period in which they exist."

Hsu Yen-hsing, who oversees the URS, says that because our social values still place a premium on developing the maximum floor area to extract the greatest possible economic value, redevelopment reform can't happen all at once. "The current policy's contradictions are inevitable," says Hsu, who argues that we need platforms like URS to promote a forward-looking residential vision.

Sean Hu, who has been building bridges between the construction industry and artists for years, says that the construction industry has an undeniably bad reputation. The only way that those firms in the industry which are so diligently and public-mindedly supporting the arts can erase lingering doubts about their efforts is to strive even harder.

Regardless, the growing connection between urban renewal and the arts is demonstrating the burgeoning power of the private sector and the arts community, and injecting new ideas into an otherwise ossified urban redevelopment system.

(left, middle) The JUT Group's 2007 HAPPY LIVING exhibition invited five internationally renowned illustrators to "play" in an expansive factory space. (courtesy of JFAA) (right) Now silent again, this deserted warehouse was lent to filmmaker Chen Chieh-jen to shoot the film Military Court and Prison.

(left, middle) The JUT Group's 2007 HAPPY LIVING exhibition invited five internationally renowned illustrators to "play" in an expansive factory space. (courtesy of JFAA) (right) Now silent again, this deserted warehouse was lent to filmmaker Chen Chieh-jen to shoot the film Military Court and Prison.

Who plants crops on pricey land in Taipei's Dazhi area? If you drop by the cargo container/visitor center next to the field you'll learn that the field is actually a landscape-art project entitled "The Wind Brings Light." Sponsored by the JUT Group, the project also includes three works by Japanese artist Susumu Shingu.

(left) Casagrande Laboratory, a Finnish alternative architecture cooperative, used an idle piece of JUT Group land in Wanhua to demonstrate the concept of the Ruin Academy and recognize the gardeners growing veggies on tiny plots around Taipei. (middle, right) The Tamkang University Department of Architecture operates Dihua Street's 127 Gallery on behalf of the Taipei City Government. The structure's first floor is an exhibition space, while its second serves as a design incubator for young architects and designers. In the future, the space is also likely to be involved in Dihua Street community development.

Who plants crops on pricey land in Taipei's Dazhi area? If you drop by the cargo container/visitor center next to the field you'll learn that the field is actually a landscape-art project entitled "The Wind Brings Light." Sponsored by the JUT Group, the project also includes three works by Japanese artist Susumu Shingu.

Four years ago, the old railway repair depot on Taipei's Civic Boulevard became the inspiration for the JUT Group's Museum of Tomorrow. The countdown installation by the entrance reminded visitors to strike while the iron was hot. The exhibition was free of charge.