The Keelung City Cultural Affairs Bureau is committed to providing the highest quality cultural arts and services with a dedicated service attitude. Through library and information, performance arts, visual arts, art promotion, cultural assets, cultural facilities, and other responsibilities, it strives to achieve cultural depth and improve the quality of citizens’ cultural life.
Culture is an integral part of human life and society as a whole. The Bureau continues to enrich the spiritual life of citizens through performing arts, visual arts, reading promotion, community development, fostering local cultural creativity, preserving cultural assets, and revitalizing cultural facilities. Continue to carry forward the essence of traditional culture, combine innovative and creative elements, and strive to build and shape the urban cultural outlook. This is to sort out the culture of the city and development context, leading citizens to understand the past, participate in the present, and move toward the future. The city’s cultural literacy and soft power will be deeply cultivated through the cultural foundation and uninterrupted accumulation.
Waley Art located in Wanhua District, Taipei City, Taiwan, is a six-story alternative space that combines young curators and artists. Since its establishment in August 2014, it has been dedicated to visual art while supporting interdisciplinary projects. We use art as a means of community-based artistic interaction, matchmaking, work with artists and community empowerment groups on art projects in the hope of discussing local issues in a different way and stimulating a productive dialogue between artists and the residents in both the old town and the communities. Waley Art is also dedicated to developing international residency exchange programs and curatorial practices, inviting art institutions, artists, and cultural workers from various countries to participate in artistic creation and research projects. In recent years, we have been holding various projects and events such as FZ Fifteen Animation & Story Gallery (2015), Asia Culture Center (2016), FASE 9 Festival de Arte Cienciay Tecnología (2017), National Taiwan Arts Education Center (2017), Mediations Biennale Polska (2018, 2020, 2022), Suwon International Photo Festival (2019 2022), VideoBardo International Videopoetry Festival (2019), 2020 Taiwan Biennial, Taiwan Video Special Program at Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2020), Now&After International Video Art Festival (2020), TIDE 1884 – Wu Tien-Chang Solo Exhibition (2020), 435 ART ZONE 2020 Special Exhibition and “Metaphors about Islands: Islands’ Shadows and Shadows’ Islands” 2021 Jakarta Biennale.
In 2020, the Keelung City Cultural Affairs Bureau commissioned Waley Art to curate the solo exhibition “TIDE 1884 – Wu Tien-Chang Solo Exhibition”. This exhibition marked artist Wu Tianzhang’s first solo exhibition upon returning to his hometown and also the inaugural exhibition of the Keelung Fort Commander’s Residence. Building on this collaboration, Waley Art and curator Professor Hongjohn Lin proposed the project “Immemory,” which focuses on the planned creation of contemporary art in the “historical turn” of over two decades, reflecting on the past and looking towards the future.