Today we went on a tour of the Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) campus. We were guided by two students, Daniel and David, who are both theater majors. The first thing I noticed was how great their sense of fashion is! That’s something I’ve been seeing a lot, especially in busy city areas like Ximenting where young adults usually flock to. Though, Daniel and David are art students so it makes sense that they’d have style regardless of being Taiwanese.
The grounds of TNUA are so beautiful, much like many other parts of Taiwan. One thing that was starkly different from many American schools that I know of was the abundance of nature surrounding and within campus. There were some large grassy fields, kind of like at Bucknell, but unlike our campus, these grassy areas had an abundance of trees and the grass was not freshly cut. Maybe it’s because the trees here, banyan trees, look so much more complex compared to our boring oak and pine trees, but that in addition to the foggy and rainy weather made it feel like the campus was built within a jungle. I wish more American schools looked like this!
We entered a couple of the student art exhibits at TNUA. The first one we went to had a lot of modern art. The first work we were drawn to here was the collection of blob-like sculptures with holes that would make noises if we blow into certain holes that are designed to be mouthpieces. Depending on which mouthpiece you’d blow into, the pitch would range from low to high. After we all took our turns trying out the musical sculptures, we dispersed. I was drawn to a collection of paintings done on plates. There were two art students that I think were guides for the exhibit and one of them explained the motive and meaning behind this piece to Daniel who translated for me. Some of the meaning might have gotten lost in translation between her, Daniel, and I, but I think I got the gist. The artist was depicting the struggles of becoming an adult as a girl and wanted to acknowledge it while attempting to protect the youth of the girls in the images. The reason why she chose the plates as a canvas is because she grew up in a home that was connected to her parent’s restaurant business, which I thought was beautiful.
My favorite piece in the exhibit, however, was a collection of photos put in frames. Each frame had two pictures in different tones of black and white. The one on the left was always of a young woman—alone, with a man who seems to be her husband, or with another family member. The picture on the right always contained an older figure with a blurred face. The two images always mirrored each other. I didn’t have this one explained to me but I could put the pieces together myself. To me, it had two meanings. One was the mortality of youth and how people can fade away over time. The other was the mortality of a loved one—someone who is no longer “in the picture”. Looking at these photos genuinely brought tears to my eyes, and had I not been in public, I probably would’ve shed more than a few of those tears.