Capturing Community Energy

The award-winning project Running Taoyuan in terms of its elements, key components, objectives, and outcome

- Kate Nicholson

In spring, the peach blossom is a familiar sight across Taoyuan, a sprawling, often overlooked city in north-western Taiwan. Trees were planted as far back as the Qing Dynasty and have since become somewhat of a city symbol.

In 2020, this delicate bloom—alongside many other inspirations—lent its colours and cultural history to the curatorial team of ‘Running Taoyuan’, a city exhibition designed to explore what lies beneath the seemingly bland façade of industry and airlines. Taoyuan is, after all, most renowned as the site of Taiwan’s largest international airport.

In Mandarin Chinese, the title of the 2020 Creative Expo Taoyuan means ‘walking’. However, the same word sounds like ‘running’ in the local dialect, Taiwanese Hokkien—an intentional play on words. “‘Running Taoyuan’ represents the energy of movement,” says Yao-Pang Wang, the event’s Chief Curator and Director of Taiwanese curatorial studio, InFormat Design. “You can, through an expo, help a city advance.”

The exhibition, which ran for ten days and was packed with displays, workshops, forums, and performances, was held in a uniquely challenging space, a former veteran’s village called New Matsu Village. These residential communities were built hastily all over Taiwan in the late 1940s and 1950s to house an influx of KMT soldiers who fled to the island nation from China at the end of the Chinese Civil War.