NPM Digital at Huashan 1914

The other day I noted and praised Taipei’s Huashan 1914 Creative Park in an old brewery complex in central Taipei. One additional attraction of Huashan 1914 is ‘NPM Digital’, an exhibition put together by the National Palace Museum of various digital art pieces. It’s interesting for a number of reasons, quite apart from that it’s great to see the NPM getting involved in this sort of thing.

First of the displays are excellent. Huang Hsin-Chien’s The Taste of Daily Life exhibit features three actual Song Dynasty porcelain vases from the NPM with interactive images superimposed over them of petals falling, rain clouds dispersing, rain falling etc etc – visitors blow through tubes to activate the images and the result is rather magical. There’s also some 3-D cartoons that grabbed the little kid’s attention and (rather worryingly this is quite common I note these days) quite a few adults too. However, a giant screen with sort of iPad technology features several Qing masterpieces including the Italian artist, who trained in the Chinese style, Giuseppe Castiglione’s (Lang Shining) One Hundred Horses (below) The large screen and touch-screen technology allows you to move across the image, zoom in and really examine the detail and brushstroke. I was amazed…and even more amazed when the 10 year old beside me who had moaned about entering the exhibit then spent the next 40 minutes playing on the screen and marvelling at the details he could find. How’s that for middle class parenting!!

The second reason to visit NPM Digital is that it is housed in the old brewery’s former boiler room constructed in 1931 and you can see some of the old cooling pipes still in place plus the graffiti added in when the brewery was derelict for many years.

This is the inlet from outside into the former boiler room, now the NPM Digital exhibit space at Huashan 1914 Creative Park