Garuda Indonesia Colours Magazine October 2013 | Page 124

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Lake Sentani
Travel | Taipei

Travel | Taipei

© Rich J Matheson

Treasure Hill, a squatters’ village
in Taipei that now plays host to a
community of artists and a regular
array of exhibitions.
Thousands of lanterns on display
as part of an exhibition of light
installations earlier this year.
Treasure Hill’s haphazard
concrete and brick houses, built by
former soldiers and their families,
have been preserved.

Rice Fields
Ubud, Indonesia

A few metres away, Travis Hung stands watching.
“This temple was built a few hundred years ago
in the Qing Dynasty,” he explains. “It used to be
one of the most important temples around Taipei.”
When the Japanese took over Taiwan in 1895,
they deemed the hilly area around the temple
to have exceptionally good water and banned
development. For years, only six families
lived nearby.
Then came the Kuomintang, the Chinese
Nationalists who, after fleeing from mainland
China in 1949, placed Taiwan under martial law.
More than 200 ex-soldiers and their families
flocked to Treasure Hill, where they built
houses and small farms, creating a unique
rural community just a stone’s throw
away from central Taipei.

Today, Treasure Hill is an altogether different
kind of settlement, home to 14 artists’ studios,
exhibition and performance spaces, a café
and a youth hostel, along with a handful of
longtime residents who maintain the same
tile-roofed houses and small patches of farmland
they built after 1949. “This is a special place,” says
Hung, who works for the non-profit foundation
that manages the village.
Treasure Hill is just one part of a cultural
renaissance that has swept through Taipei, turning
neglected urban spaces into design studios, music
halls, craft workshops and independent shops.
The Songshan Creative and Cultural Park brings
art and design into a former tobacco factory;
Huashan 1914 Creative Park is a former distillery
that is now a popular destination for music fans,
and arts and craft lovers; and the Taipei Cinema
Park screens films outdoors.
“We are facing competition from China,
globalisation, climate change, a low birth rate,”
says Lin Yu-hsiu, a section chief at the Urban
Regeneration Office, which transforms vacant
buildings into creative spaces. “We have to think
about how to move forward, but in a wiser way
than before. We want a better life.” That better
life has come about through efforts to reduce
pollution, build parks and improve public
transport in what used to be a rough-and-ready
Asian Tiger boomtown. But for many young

Courtesy of Treasure Hill Artists Village, © Rich J Matheson, Courtesy of Taipei Cinema Park

It’s a scorchingly hot afternoon
in Taipei, and cicadas are buzzing
loudly outside the Treasure Hill
Temple. A man in cycling gear
stops to take a swig of water
before turning towards the
temple’s statue of Guanyin,
the Chinese goddess of mercy.
He clasps his hands and bows
three times, paying his respects.

people in Taipei, it has also meant a shift
in mindset, sacrificing some traditional
ambitions – a prestigious career, lots
of money, expensive stuff – in favour
of a slow but more spiritually
rewarding way of life.

Handmade Paper. In the front of her small
split-level house is a shop where she sells
her creations; upstairs is a studio dominated
by a large metal basin, where she picks
up a wood-framed screen to explain
her working process.

“People are willing to do something
creative even if it means they only have
a modest income,” says Hung. “I moved
to Taipei ten years ago. Since then, the
change is huge, and what’s changed
most is the human feel.”

“Most paper is made by putting pulp
in here and running water through it,”
she says, waving the screen up and
down. “I drop things into the pulp to
create patterns and colour – kozo fibre,
old coffee trays, twine. I also use old
convenience store receipt ̻