Taichung’s New Cultural Megastructure Could Be Taiwan’s Soft Power Monument

Elena Leo is the Arts & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.

With SANAA’s flexible design and a keen global programme, the Taichung Green Museumbrary would be an announcement of architectural ambition as much as a beacon of cultural assertiveness for Taiwan

When it opens later this December, Taichung Green Museumbrary will likely be one of the most dramatic cultural buildings in Asia — and Taiwan’s most ambitious public work in a decade. The massive 58,000 square metre complex, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architects SANAA and Taiwan’s Ricky Liu & Associates, combines a new contemporary art museum with the city’s primary public library. It sits as a collection of airborne glass blocks in Central Park, Taichung, its sheet-metal curtain glowing with light like a breath of mist.

But beneath the surface glimmer is a harder issue. Is this maybe Taiwan’s most explicit investment to date in cultural soft power — an architectural handshake with the world, and a new form of national storytelling?

Architecture as Gesture
For SANAA principals Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the building is their biggest cultural commission to date. Eight volumes, linked and elevated several feet above grade, create a series of public spaces, shaded promenades and rooftop gardens that transition smoothly into the park. Their hoped-for goal: to eliminate the line between in and out, between reading and viewing, between civic life and cultural imagination.

While the translucency and softness of SANAA’s appearance are not new, the size and refinement here are substantial. The building generates an eye-catching veil of light and metal in a city better known for its manufacturing and tech industries. It’s a dramatic shift — not only in looks, but in the way Taiwan perceives itself on the global cultural map.

A Museum in a Forest, A Library in a Park

The Taichung Art Museum (TcAM) will open a multi-national exhibition A Call of All Beings featuring artists from over 20 nations. Curated jointly by Taiwanese, American, Korean and Romanian curators, the exhibition addresses the human ambivalence towards the more-than-human world, prioritizing ecological thinking and spiritual imagination.

Highlights include a site-specific atrium installation by Korean artist Haegue Yang, alluding to Asian sacred tree traditions, and a painted-environment-sized work by Taiwanese artist Michael Lin, drawing on textile patterns and family memory. There are also late sculptures by Joseph Beuys, a new kite installation by Joan Jonas, and archive materials relating to The Little Prince, introducing a literary dimension to the museum’s theme of respect for the environment.

Performance art and dance — eternally marginalized in institutional contexts — are at the forefront here. Indigenous-led dance company TAI Body Theatre and contemporary dance company YiLab will present new commissions, together with video and sound works.

The programme is described as a “co-curation model” that favors “co-created meaning across cultures, disciplines and perspectives.” It’s an ambitious, open-ended model — but does it demonstrate curatorial confidence or a strategy still finding its feet? Since the museum is located at the intersection of ecology, spirituality, and art, its identity will depend maybe less on inherent categories than on how people use and relate to it. Will library and museum mix in use, or remain functionally distinct? How will this hybrid space address young viewers, or the general public who are not already fluent in contemporary art? Also to be considered is whether or not the institution is an international-standard collecting museum, or whether it specialises in temporary exhibitions and new commissions.

Civic Symbolism and Cultural Stakes

Taipei has traditionally overshadowed Taiwan’s cultural landscape, but investment in Taichung, symbolic and economic, means a deliberate redirection of cultural capital. The site itself, reclaimed from a military airbase, is a striking transformation: from militarised space to civic space.

Is Taichung positioning itself as regional hub, but as a counterpoint to the capital? The government’s language around “creative capital” talks of long-term aspirations — aspirations greater than urban revitalisation or tourism. In the era of geopolitics where international legitimacy is increasingly being forged through culture, this cross-species museum-library is a cultural offer.

For SANAA, it is one of the exceedingly few public buildings anywhere on earth beyond Japan where their vision of architecture as common, lived space is realized.

For Taiwan, perhaps it is something even wider: evidence that imagination, debate, and the public sphere are not the exclusive domain of nationhood but tools of strategy.

Taichung’s new landmark might not yet hold the status of a national icon, but it clearly signals Taiwan’s aspirations — showcasing imagination, openness, and cultural significance on the global stage.