Introduction: Making Space

The lifting of 38 years of martial law in Taiwan in 1987, driven by the desire for change flourishing among its growing civil society, offered Taiwanese artists previously unseen sociopolitical and material grounds for spatial liberation. Most of the Taiwanese artists who later founded independent art spaces were born during the martial law era. When the air of freedom arrived, they took ‘space’ seriously as a subject of experimentation in their avant-garde artistic practice.⁰¹ On their own terms, they formed independent art spaces as physical sites for free public gatherings, community building, progressive art showcases, artist-to-artist curatorial experiments and the articulation of new discourses.

These art spaces, which artists of diverse backgrounds and interests organised in different parts of Taiwan, carried a shared symbolic meaning: ‘an assertion of agency in redefining markers of value outside established institutional frameworks’, including the museum-circuit and art-market mechanisms.⁰² The stories of these independent art spaces offer glimpses of the art ecologies in post-martial law Taiwan that actively engaged with collectivity, adaptive structuring, cross-cultural art practices and philosophies, media innovation and social realities.

Making Space: Independent Artist Initiatives in Taiwan since 1988 builds on the long-term research and archiving project ‘Independent Art Spaces of Taiwan’ (2022–25), led by Asia Art Archive (AAA) to document and preserve the legacy of artist initiatives that emerged across Taiwan beginning in the late 1980s. The three-year project produced digitised archives and transcribed interviews with participating artists. Access to these primary materials formed the basis for this book’s ‘archive’ section: case studies comprising interview extracts and archival materials of eight independent artist initiatives established in Taipei / Taoyuan, Kaohsiung and Tainan between 1988 and 2000.

The art spaces considered here are IT Park (1988–2025), Space II (1989–94), Up Art Gallery (1990–95), Corner Culture (1992–95), Shin Leh Yuan Art Space (1995–ongoing), Bamboo Curtain Studio (1995–2021), Sin Pin Pier Art Space (1997–ongoing) and Paint House Studio (2000–18). Artists’ recollections – of how the various independent art spaces were created in their localities, what types of art they showed, and what discourse or energy or community they generated – are placed in dialogue with archival materials, including photographic documentation of the physical spaces, selected exhibition views, ephemera and news clippings. Many Taiwanese artists returned to post-martial law Taiwan having studied abroad and gained insights and hungers, and many found themselves, once back in Taiwan, in new phases of art education and social justice movements.

Punctuating the voices and documents of the ‘archive’ are new critical perspectives. These include Wang Pin-Hua’s exploration of Up Art Gallery’s development as a co-operative venture that shuffled social relationships among art practitioners in Kaohsiung, foregrounding different art ecologies within and between north and south Taiwan. Fiona Yu-Lun Hsu focusses on the Plum Tree Creek project (2009–23) that Bamboo Curtain Studio initiated in a Taipei suburb, the reverberations of which have continued even after the studio’s closure; she traces the project’s transformations via exhibitions, archives, narratives and policy strategies. The archive also includes a new translation of Yu Wei’s 2002 text ‘Fresh Paint’, written in the early days of Paint House Studio, an initiative that was a marker of architectural and site-specific experimentation in Tainan.

Complementing the book’s ‘archive’ is a selection of new essays from diverse perspectives that consider the key critical questions of this historical moment and the lessons we can take from it today. The selection begins with a contextualisation of the sociopolitical stakes of cultural space in this era written by Nicole Wang, co-author of this introduction and editor of the book. Connecting Taiwan’s democracy movement to the People Power Revolution in the Philippines in 1986, she situates the emergence of independent art spaces in relation to broader currents in Taiwanese society, particularly in terms of spatial autonomy, governance, economic resources and institution building practices. The rise in government subsidies and the formalisation of curating as a practice after 2000 fundamentally changed the operation and orientation of independent art spaces, prompting the question: What were these spaces seeking to be ‘independent’ from?

This is a question that echoes throughout the texts from this era by Lien Teh-Cheng and Lee Jiun-Shyan, which have been translated into English for the first time for this publication. Lien Teh-Cheng’s ‘Alternative Spaces: Alternative to What?’ was one of the first critical examinations of independent artist initiatives in Taipei in the early 1990s. Lee Jiun-Shyan’s essay offers observations of a wave of art spaces that emerged in southern Taiwan in the mid-2000s, led by relatively young and carefree organisers who did not see themselves as marginalised.

Yeh Hsing-Jou introduces the changes in Taiwan’s media landscape that ET@T fostered from the mid-1990s, studying the group’s digital art creation, independent film production and multimedia platforms – all powered by a DIY, collective spirit combined with concerns around issues of Taiwanese cultural identity. ET@T’s activities prompt an observation related to art and technology that grows ever more relevant today: mastering programming codes and understanding website syntax have become essential skills for discursive practice.

Wu Mali situates the histories documented in the present publication within a broader timeline, from the establishment of the United States Information Service in Taipei during the Cold War, to the present. Her reflections on relational and discursive spaces in Taiwan draw upon the role of tea houses as exhibition venues and gathering places for artists and dissidents, a phenomenon she traces back to at least the 1950s. She extends her discussion to the independent presses and social movements of the 1980s, including environmental, social, labour issues and women’s liberation movements.

Finally, to critically expand some of the book’s discussions around art space and practice, Lu Wei-Lun’s essay introduces Indigenous initiatives in Taiwan’s art ecosystem since the 2000s, in an essay that focusses on the artistic developments in several communities on the east coast. At Taitung and Hualien, ethnic and ethical concerns of art representation point to the ways in which Indigenous knowledge systems remain outside the lens of conventional art historical research. A dialogue with Dondon Hounwn, founder of Elug Art Corner, located in the Dowmung community of Xiulin Township, Hualien, elaborates on how the concept of Gaya, the ancestral laws and norms of Truku culture, can guide understanding of the relationships between art and space.

Taiwan’s art world experienced enormous changes from the 2010s onwards. As democratisation matured, artist communities increasingly understood themselves as participants in civil society, and the agenda of independent art spaces expanded into the terrains of cultural policy, public resources and institutional governance. The Taipei Contemporary Art Center (TCAC, 2010–21) became the most concentrated testing ground for this shift. Extending from a 2008 biennial proposal, it was conceived from the outset as a site for the public debate of cultural policy more than for exhibition-making. The debates it provoked – around how independent spaces might engage with wider questions without being absorbed by the very structures they sought to address – remain unresolved today.

By the late 2010s and into the 2020s, a different posture was taking shape. A new generation of smaller spaces were operating through a more hybrid logic: placing exhibitions alongside community-oriented programmes, international exchanges and residencies. Today, they no longer define themselves primarily through opposition to the establishment, but they continue to serve as experimental grounds for younger artists. The object of experimentation has shifted: from the disruptive new forms that animated early 1990s alternative spaces, to the flexibility of the space itself as a site to be reconfigured. What broader social currents this shift relates to is not yet settled.

What is striking, looking back across the full span of activity this book addresses, is how consistently the spaces themselves have turned to recording their own histories – a recurring impulse over the past three decades, resulting in anniversary volumes, websites with documentation of past exhibitions, retrospective publications, photobooks and zines tracing relational and performative projects, and informal collections of ephemera. Some of these projects are elaborate and some are modest; some have been initiated collectively, others by individual artists returning to their own earlier involvements. But taken together, they form a quiet archival labour that precedes and accompanies external research. The materials on which this book draws – and the wider archive held at AAA – are continuous with these self-kept records. In this sense, the book’s role is less to document this history from the outside than to gather and reread what its agents and actors have long preserved for themselves, and to open those materials to readers working on related questions in Taiwan and beyond.

We thank our long-standing partners in the Exhibition Histories series: Sneha Ragavan and Anthony Yung at Asia Art Archive; Tom Eccles and Mariano López Seoane at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Mick Wilson at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg; and Felix Vogel and Mi You at documenta Institut. Most of the texts in this volume were written in traditional Chinese and translated into English to reach global readers. A bilingual glossary is included for cross-lingual research. This endeavour continues Afterall’s commitment to bring locally rooted artistic aspirations, ecosystems, knowledge and contexts to regional and global research communities. We give our heartfelt thanks to all the contributors to this publication for their trust and scholarship.