Creating an Open-Air Art Museum: Highlights of the Taoyuan Land Art Festival

By the MOOK Scenic Spots Editorial Team
 
The Taoyuan Land Art Festival takes place from September 9 to September 25 in the Xinyi and Bade districts. It centers around distinctive local features such as stone weirs, irrigation ponds, coastlines, and natural ecology. The festival is a promising new highlight for tourism in Taoyuan, built on three core themes—local awakening, community engagement, and art anchoring—as well as four key values: community participation, local identity, environmental sustainability, and circular economy, aiming to establish a locally rooted art event brand.

The Land Art Festival takes you along the coastline to explore the scenery and installations of Xinyi, invites you into communities to experience local life, and hosts artists working on-site in factories. From individual artworks to collective creations with local residents, it offers a spectacular sensory feast, forming an open-air art museum. The festival includes 37 art installations, 8 themed events, and 6 irrigation pond concerts, combining the work of artists with that of tourist factories to deliver a uniquely immersive experience.

The Xinyi exhibition area has invited 12 international masters including Shun-Ron Lin, Ming-Tao Fan-Chiang, and Xu... Along the route from the Xinyi Yong'an Fishing Port, through the Green Corridor, to the Driftwood Park, 16 art installations are displayed. Amid the sound of waves and sea breeze, visitors can enjoy a unique art festival. Through artist residencies and collaborative works with residents, the exhibits resonate with local landscapes such as communities, schools, business districts, libraries, irrigation channels, cultural sites, historic buildings, and fishing ports. The exhibition areas include the Fan-Chiang Historic Houses, Rice Story Museum, Hakka Culture Library, Water Lane Secret Garden, schools, and communities.

In addition, the festival features other activities, including: Beach Clean-Up—encouraging participants to clean the coast and use recycled materials for collaborative art; Thousand People Build a Stone Weir—an expert-guided experience of the nearly lost traditional technique of building stone weirs, evoking memories of the past fishing lifestyle; Air Raid Fun Run—a "themed fun run" along the coast and among art installations, spanning approximately 1.7 kilometers; Defend the Weir in Xinyi—a specially made miniature pond demonstrating the principles of stone weir construction, plus hourly storytelling sessions with the children's picture book "Grandpa Stone Weir Tells Stories," blending education with fun and hands-on learning. These activities allow everyone to become an action artist and invite friends to enjoy the land art.
 

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