A Call of All Beings: See you tomorrow, same time, same place

The Taichung Green Museumbrary, designed by SANAA—the Japanese architectural team led by Pritzker Prize laureates Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa—opens on December 13, 2025, inaugurating Taiwan's first integrated metropolitan art museum and central library complex. Situated within Central Park on the former Shuinan military airport site, the 5.8-hectare facility comprises eight interconnected volumes wrapped in expanded aluminum mesh—SANAA's largest cultural project to date, manifesting their investigation into visual permeability and spatial porosity. 

The Taichung Art Museum launches with the exhibition A Call of All Beings: See you tomorrow, same time, same place, co-curated by the museum's in-house curators alongside Ling-Chih Chow (Taiwan), Alaina Claire Feldman (USA), and Anca Mihuleţ-Kim (Romania/South Korea). The curatorial collaboration weaves multiple methodologies—from Daoist philosophies to indigenous cosmologies, from embodied knowledge to non-Western perspectives—creating a multivocal framework that resists singular narratives about nature, culture, and interspecies relations.

The exhibition draws from the museum's collection and new commissions to trace how human-nature relationships have been imagined and transformed. Central Taiwan masters establish historical grounding: Chen Ting-Shih's The First Crack of Thunder (1972) renders natural forces through cane fiber relief; Yeh Huo-Cheng captures Mount Huoyan's mineral-rich earth with impasto; Wang Ching-Shuang's lacquerwork employs maki-e and mother-of-pearl inlay. Chen Hsing-Wan's The Song of the Earth No.1 uses cowhide as ground for hardened fabric forms—the leather pulsing with vitality while textiles congeal into permanence.

Contemporary commissions extend these investigations. Chen Yin-Ju's Evocative of Mountains and Seas reconstructs mythical animals from the 2,000-year-old Chinese bestiary through sound, scent, and minimal text. Au Sow Yee's The Broadcast Project II: A Many Splendored Thing of the Coconut, a Belle from Penang and the Secret Agent II interweaves colonial histories of Malaya through fictional narratives of coconut palms and fragmented archives. Hong-Kai Wang's collaborative publication Our Words Don't Suit Prophecies Anymore asks how we might listen to beings without language.

International contributions complicate human-nature binaries. Joan Jonas's By a Thread in the Wind—bamboo paper kites suspended overhead—evokes uncanny species, requiring upward rather than forward-facing attention. Loukia Alavanou's VR installation On the Way to Colonus reimagines Greek tragedy within Athens' Roma settlement, transforming marginalized peripheries into sites of dignity. Karolina Breguła documents coastal communities confronting rising seas. Haitian artist Myrlande Constant's beaded Vodou flags (drapos) blend faith, history, and social reality, presenting a cosmology where deities and humans coexist.

Artists engage architectural and performative dimensions. Seung Hyun Moon's On Thin and Transparent Things activates galleries through bodies negotiating spatial barriers—the artist, born with cerebral palsy, interrogates relationships between consciousness and space. TAI Body Theatre's performances invoke Truku mythology where giants' bodies become island topography, transforming the museum into a "dwelling place of giants."

The exhibition incorporates pivotal historical positions: Joseph Beuys's late sculptures transform therapeutic objects into vessels for healing; Ana Mendieta's final earth-body works merge corporeal and terrestrial surfaces; Chris Marker's Bestiaire series explores reciprocal gazes between humans and animals; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince manuscripts provide meditations on care and imagination.

See you tomorrow, same time, same place extends an invitation for collective gathering and shared futures. While the exhibition unfolds across gallery, non-gallery, and library spaces, the museum simultaneously launches its biennial TcAM Art Commission program. Haegue Yang's Liquid Votive—Tree Shade Triad rises through the 27-meter atrium invoking transcultural arboreal veneration, and Michael Lin's Processed transforms Taiwanese textile patterns into architectural interventions. These two-year commissions establish dialogue between permanent architecture and artistic intervention.

Through its inaugural programs, Taichung Art Museum positions itself as a gathering space where multiple narratives converge—a platform for diverse voices to imagine alternative futures.