Towering figures
The origins of IT Park can be traced back to 1982. That’s the year that Richard Lin, a Taiwanese Minimalist master who had long lived overseas, returned to Taiwan and declared, “Painting is dead!” He introduced new concepts like Raumkunst (spatial art) and installation art to Taiwan, and attracted many acolytes, including Tsong Pu, Jun T. Lai, Hu Kun-jung, and Chang Yung-tsun. It was the first stone cast in a cataclysmic restructuring of Taiwan’s arts topography.
Not long thereafter, in 1983, Taiwan’s first museum of modern art—the Taipei Fine Arts Museum—was founded. It was also around that time that a group of artists with a strong politically dissident orientation (led by Wu Tien-chang and Yang Mao-lin) formed the 101 Modern Art Group. In 1987, the government lifted martial law, and progressive social and artistic movements (including the Little Theater Movement and New Wave films) flourished and fed off of one another.
There was a titanic collision between tradition and innovation, each defending its values, bringing epic figures to the fore. In 1988, Tsong Pu, Liu Ching-tang, Chen Hui-chiao, and Huang Wen-hao joined forces to found IT Park, located in an old apartment block adjacent to Yitong Park in Taipei City.
Liu remembers that they chose the appellation “Park” because they wanted to create a space that differed from typical museums or galleries. They wanted the relationship between visitors and artworks to be more than just “passing through.” They wanted their venue to have an open feel, welcoming to people from all walks of life, with visitors coming and going without tickets or salespeople to hassle them, a place where you could sit for a while and sip on a drink, like a relaxing park….
In an unplanned, organic way, this space increasingly gave scattered artists a sense of “belonging.” Each day at dusk, culturati would gather here and often chat deep into the night. Gradually it became more and more like “home.” Going with the flow, two years later IT Park invited more than 20 active artists to hold a formal opening exhibition. As word of the show got around, people started showing up in a steady stream.
“The artists sat next to their works,” recalls Liu, “and anyone who came, maybe just a high-school student wandering in without any idea what was inside, maybe a grandma just taking her grandson on an aimless stroll, could discuss the work with the artist, and even critique or debate it.” IT Park was not a non-profit museum, it was not a market-oriented commercial gallery, it was not a dues-paying arts society—it was simply a space where non-mainstream artists could, free from any market pressures whatsoever, let their creativity run free.
You can imagine that artworks like these were not exactly easy to sell, and IT Park found it impossible to rely on sales commissions. The next idea was to set up a bar inside the gallery as a way to keep their bankbook in balance, but after a while, as everyone got to know everyone else, they more or less stopped taking money for the drinks. In fact, financial pressure has been the norm at IT Park, with the whole operation depending upon revenues from the commercial photography studio set up next to IT Park by founder Liu Ching-tang.
IT Park has always been a place where artists can gather and hang out. These impromptu get-togethers have produced many a precious image.