"Traversing Tainan", The City Exhibition of Tainan

The Tainan City Exhibition "Traversing Tainan, a Journey through 400 years " in Tainan Art Museum guided visitors traversing 400 years ago Tainan. The curatorial team focused on the most significant space changing events by historical maps and expressed the different ruler’s understanding of city management that affected the people’s lives, and revealed Tainan's geographical and political textures in different periods. Since 1624 when the Dutch East India Company built fort Zeelandia and Taioan city on the coast of Tainan as the international trading post, Tainan became the first city of Taiwan. The team transformed and remade the maps in technological and esthetical way to define the space changing characteristics of each period of Tainan and the idea connected all the six galleries.

Besides the maps, here are the main designing ideas of the exhibition. First for interactive purpose, the team designed the knobs connected to Tainan city data along with grand time-lapse Tainan scenery, visitors can switch it to get the consequence of city digital governance by ground projection, and also view the pictures and anecdotes of landscapes and nearing completing public constructions of Tainan by wall projection.

The second idea is to rebuild the historical scene by Generative AI, the team set prompt by some keywords from the diaries or traveling notes of each historical period to generate artistic and imaginary scene of past Tainan echoing the exhibits marked significant change of that period.

The third, for artistic interpretation of traditional Tainan space development, Tainan born artist Lin Shu-Kai presented his works located inside the exhibition panel walls for viewing them through the holes, and some in corners, which inspired from the past Tainan’s maps and landscapes of each period.

The fourth idea is interpreting Tainan spatial plan by making a short poetic, symbolic and some kind abstractive film through lights, visuals, and sounds telling a story about environmental issues, in last gallery, the audience can think about Tainan will coexist with nature and keeps to maintain the resilience for long years and head for sustainable development.