The graying Li recalls the origins of his connection with the National Taiwan Museum. Taipei born and bred, while a student at Cheng Yuan High School Li enjoyed spending his weekends visiting art exhibitions at the museum (then the Taiwan Provincial Museum). “Back then the museum was basically one big art gallery,” recalls Li. “Whenever there was a provincial or national exhibition, there’d be hundreds of pictures on display there, covering the walls of the lobby and both wings. The most I remember seeing would have been for the Tai-Yang Art Society’s exhibitions.”
Later, while studying at the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University, Li would commute between Tamsui and Taipei every day. Getting off the train at Taipei Railway Station each day he would see the National Taiwan Museum at the other end of Guanqian Road. Strolling around the domed building is a cherished memory of his childhood. “Back then it wasn’t easy to travel abroad, and so the museum helped assuage Taipei residents’ imaginings of places like Greece and Rome,” Li explains.
Now a century old, the National Taiwan Museum has undergone renovations large and small over the years, including in the wake of the 6.8-magnitude earthquake of March 31, 2002. This quake caused severe damage to the south façade and the structure of the museum, resulting in the building being closed for major repairs. Li was a member of the landmarks preservation commission, and took the opportunity to closely inspect how the building was constructed, even getting up on the dome to get a clearer picture. In 2015, Li was invited by the museum to participate in another project, this time in celebration of the Nanmen Park building’s centenary—he was asked to create architectural drawings of the museum and showcase them in a special exhibition.
Seeing the detail
Why showcase the museum in architectural drawings? As Taiwan’s oldest museum, the physical structure of the National Taiwan Museum is one of its most unique points. However, ordinary folk don’t have the access throughout the museum that Li did. Using different angles and perspectives—fisheye, bug’s eye, bird’s eye, cross-sections, and more—Li “deconstructed” the building, leading viewers into the hidden details and soaring over the dome, to give them unprecedented views of the historic structure.
According to Li, a good architectural drawing “packs in the most detail it can, giving voice to the drawing and letting it speak to its fullest degree.” The magic of architectural drawings lies in how they can dissect buildings and facilitate observation of the finer details within. Such drawings incorporate elements of structural mechanics, geometry, math, art, and history, among other things, and each image contains 30 to 50 items of specialist terminology—only when all of these are present is it truly a successful drawing.
With a lifelong fascination with and foundation in art, Li has no difficulty drawing buildings. But in order to incorporate more detail, he works tirelessly on refining both his angles and his methods, using different vanishing points, cutaways, and exploded views. Starting with the basic draft, then coloring, putting in detail, and adding lighting, Li meticulously recreated this historic museum’s beauty stroke by stroke.
Details of a classic
The National Taiwan Museum includes not only the original museum, but also the Land Bank Exhibition Hall and Nanmen Park’s Red House and White Palace buildings, along with the Japanese-era Railway Department by Old Taipei City’s North Gate, although this last location is still being renovated.
The oldest of these buildings was constructed in 1902, the youngest in 1933. “Those 30-plus years were right when Taiwan first moved from an agricultural society to a commercial one. It was a crucial period of modernization,” says Li.
The White Palace is the oldest, part of a former camphor processing plant and the oldest stone-built Western-style building in Taiwan still standing. The outer walls are the building’s most distinctive element, having been constructed from stones that were part of Taipei’s city walls before they were torn down by the Japanese, thus making it a part of Taipei City history.
The Red House was built in 1914 out of red brick. For load-bearing purposes, the interior boasts a concentrated collection of reinforced concrete columns. In its earliest days, the Red House was a camphor warehouse; today it is preserved as part of Taipei’s industrial history.
The main building of the museum was constructed in 1915 and remains Taiwan’s most iconic piece of neoclassical architecture. It is a long, narrow building stretching from left to right, with the entrance in the center. The outside of the building has several Doric columns, while inside the columns are mostly of a fusion style. The roof sports a dome built of reinforced concrete in a Roman style. Overall, it is Taiwan’s most authentically Renaissance-inspired building. Li Chien-lang has drawn several renderings of the entrance, as well as using a front-on cross-section to expose the architectural details of the museum, awing visitors with its spectacle.
The former Railway Department, located near the North Gate, was finished in 1919. The bottom floor is built with red brick, while the second floor is wood, the largest extant example of half-timber construction in Taiwan. The floor plan is in a V shape, with the entrance located on a corner of the road, with prominent bay windows and flanked by towers. To give a closer view of the architectural details, Li uses cross-sections and exploded views, offering a detailed look at the interior layout and structure of the floors.
The Land Bank Exhibition Hall was constructed in 1933, and sports a colonnade that gives the building an air of dignity and gravitas. However, these columns are not in the traditional Greek or Roman style, but rather themed around rice ears, rice leaves, and fantastical beasts, incorporating the fascinating geometry of the Art Deco style to create a wholly unique melding of East and West. Using low angles in his perspective drawings of this building, Li elevates a section of the colonnade, thus making it easier to see the details of the columns and the ceiling of the colonnade.
NTM rhapsody
“Renderings are really an optical illusion,” says Li. Since the Renaissance, artists have used different perspectives to render three-dimensional spaces on two-dimensional surfaces. Li has taken this to a more fantastical level, placing all five of the museum’s buildings along the same fictional street and emulating the Beatles’ famous Abbey Road album cover, with four small figures clad in 1930s-era fashion striding across a pedestrian crossing.
To give more artistic flair to another of his imaginative architectural drawings, Li turned to the Japanese art of ukiyo-e, and specifically Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige’s piece Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi and Atake. Li took the people from the image, carrying their wax-paper umbrellas in the rain, and placed them in the plaza in front of the main museum building, helping audiences feel more connected to the scene through their own familiarity. In a third image, by placing the bridge from Zhang Zeduan’s Along the River During Qingming Festival in front of the museum building, he created an image that seems to echo with the hustle and bustle of the city.
Creating architectural drawings is time-consuming. Initially Li had only planned to make ten images, but he found he didn’t want to stop, and ultimately produced nearly ten times as many. Li has welcomed visitors to the exhibition, even letting them take photos with his artworks. Inside the exhibition, five miniature models of the museum buildings are on display, enabling audiences to freely go between 2D and 3D. Li hopes that this exhibition will help make historical buildings a more recognized part of everyday life by explaining their aesthetics and by firing imaginations. A long-time advocate for cultural heritage preservation, and particularly traditional Taiwanese architecture, in January 2016 Li received the National Cultural Award, recognizing his four decades of effort in this regard. He is modest about his achievements, but watching him explain his images to visitors, his intense passion for historic architecture is clear to see.
In January 2016, Li Chien-lang received the National Cultural Award. He is recognized as one of Taiwan’s few artists able to draw buildings freehand. (photo by Chin Hung-hao)
A watercolor exploded view of the old Railway Department building.
In this low-angle structural drawing of the Land Bank Exhibition Hall, Li lifts up a section of the colonnade to reveal the details of the columns and ceiling.
Li Chien-lang explains his exploded-view depiction of the old Railway Department building, leading visitors on a visual trip into this historic landmark. (photo by Chin Hung-hao)
An imaginative mashup of the National Taiwan Museum and the classical Chinese painting Along the River During Qingming Festival.
A winter view of the main National Taiwan Museum building.
A watercolor section of the White Palace building.
