Across the island, former industrial sites have been reborn as artist villages, transforming relics of the past into creative hubs.

STORY AND PHOTOS BY LILLYGOL SEDAGHAT AND CORY HOWELL HAMADA

The smokestack from the Kio-A-Thau (Qiaotou) Sugar Refinery in Kaohsiung rises above a spreading complex of concrete warehouses and former worker dormitories. Once famous as Taiwan’s first mechanized sugar refinery, the factory ceased operations in 1999 and has since been retrofitted as a museum, public park, and artist village.

“It was built during the Japanese colonial period but fell into disuse with the decline of Taiwan’s sugar industry,” says He Zheng-yi, manager at Kio-A-Thau Sugar Refinery Artist Village (KAT). “Over time, local art groups collaborated to gradually revitalize the area.”

The sugar refinery is one of many historic sites in Taiwan that have been given new life as an arts and cultural center. “The art village continues Kio-A-Thau’s spiritual values, while also exploring new possibilities through environmental education and art curation,” says He.

In the fall of 2024, we stayed at KAT as artists-in-residence, living in a small forest once surrounded by sugarcane fields. Working as a multimedia storytelling team alongside international and Taiwan-based artists, we developed a public exhibition that examined how railway tracks have shaped the surrounding community.

Our residencies at KAT and later at The Pier-2 Art Center in Kaohsiung showed us firsthand the role of art in urban regeneration, offering economic and social benefits to surrounding neighborhoods while keeping us connected to themes driving public debate in Taiwan.

He tells us that artist villages began to take shape in Taiwan in the late 1990s, when the Council for Cultural Affairs (now the Ministry of Culture) promoted the Artist-in-Residence Program to provide platforms for international exchange.

Across Taiwan, long-idle industrial sites — from tobacco factories and breweries to sugar refineries — have been reinvented as cultural landmarks, including Taipei’s Songshan Cultural and Creative Park (also known as Songyan). Others have been converted into studios for working artists. By the early 2000s, these efforts had spread beyond government entities, with NGOs and independent collectives joining local revitalization campaigns.

Taiwan now reportedly has more than 50 artist-in-residence programs (one of the highest per-capita rates in the world) in which selected artists embed themselves in a community and create art based on thematic elements discovered in the immediate environment. The artist villages often draw on Taiwan’s layered history — its colonial past, vanished agricultural landscapes, and shifting languages — translating those elements into works that probe identity, the human relationship with nature, and the elusive contours of the island itself.

“Art is not achieved overnight,” says He. “It is gradually shaped through the construction of cultural values and the rise of community awareness.”

Life in an artist village

Living in an artist village sometimes means sharing a single laundry machine with 10 other people — the ethos is communal.

At KAT, residents work in one multi-use room, each staking out a corner and a table or two, then filling the space with paintings, photographs, or calligraphy. During our stay, every enclave reflected its occupant: a French painter drew inspiration from his surroundings, experimenting with Taiwan’s ubiquitous Hey Song Sarsaparilla and Apple Sidra (carbonated soft drinks), and even betel nut as he burned the midnight oil. Nearby, a Taipei ink-wash artist tucked lottery receipts into a striped rayon bag beside his handmade paper and bottles of black ink.

For its part, The Pier-2 Art Center, located on the north edge of Taiwan’s largest harbor, provides each artist or team with an individual studio and bathroom, along with a shared common room and kitchenette. Once used by the Taiwan Sugar Corporation to store fishmeal, the 33-square-meter studios now resemble compact galleries, with upstairs quarters for living.

Meals are usually simple — cooking in the shared kitchen or picking up meat buns and scallion pancakes from the nearest street stall. At both KAT and Pier-2, we improvised by bringing along a coffee maker and a rice cooker, ensuring the daily essentials without having to step outside.

There’s an unspoken rule among the cohort of artists: always pass things on to future artists-in-residence. As one artist or group left and another arrived, we gave and received everything from masking tape and bug spray to Ikea mattress toppers and comfy office chairs.

At the core of the artist village model is an exchange of ideas, not only among the artists themselves but also with the surrounding community.

“Conversations with other artists, along with meeting local factory owners and mechanics, opened my eyes to different ways of thinking,” says Jao Yu-chen, a Pier-2 artist-in-residence and multimedia artist. “Those exchanges, together with exploring a new city and its materials, have stayed with me and continue to shape how I approach my practice.”

A 2019 report in the journal European Planning Studies found that interest and investment in historical sites can lead to greater appreciation of and confidence in local culture. Converting former industrial facilities, it noted, can also drive sustainable development by strengthening heritage conservation, improving community identity, and boosting cultural activity and civic engagement.

“Artists engage with local residents, allowing them to not just be spectators but co-creators in the art,” says KAT’s He. For our residency exhibition at KAT, we interviewed and photographed local train conductors, security guards, and groundskeepers, sharing their stories in the form of documentary art.

“Through the operation of the art village, the buildings and industrial heritage are not merely preserved but transformed into spaces for creation, exhibition, and exchange,” says He.

The attraction of Pier-2

Following our 2024 residency at KAT, we lived as artists-in-residence at The Pier-2 Art Center. During Taiwan’s martial law era, Kaohsiung Harbor was the entry point for many international goods and foods. As the economy shifted away from agriculture in the 1970s, some of its warehouses fell into disuse. While the port remains a major industrial hub, many of those facilities have since been remade as retail spaces and cultural venues, drawing families and tourists for concerts, open-air festivals, and art exhibitions.

Like many of Taiwan’s artist villages, Pier-2 is defined by contrasts — an ebb and flow between past and present. Japanese colonial architecture stands beside postwar industrial structures; a natural coastline and rising coral-reef mountain border the sprawling port; and longtime residents share the neighborhood with venues crowded by day-trippers.

“I feel like the city is always flowing,” says Pier-2 Artist-in-Residence Jerry Huang, an atmospheric scientist and photographer from Taipei. “Kaohsiung is a city near the ocean. Different people move here and then they stay. There is a flow, and a lot of things get stored here, a kind of memory.”

According to data from the Taiwan Tourism Administration, Pier-2 saw more than 8 million visitors in 2024, up from about 890,000 in 2010.

Over our three-month tenure, we noticed not just the swelling crowds at Pier-2 but their variety. Midweek, tour groups and schoolchildren clustered around public art installations. Evenings brought joggers, families, and office workers enjoying the motorbike-free waterfront. On weekends, the space filled with couples and young creatives drawn to live music and craft markets.

What struck us most at both Pier-2 and KAT was how public art and creative events infused the spaces with a sense of energy — a cool factor that drew people in.

Research from 2019 published in the academic journal Tourism Management found that “creativity in practice,” including artists living and working on site, live performances, and craft fairs, helps attract visitors and builds destination loyalty, encouraging people to return and recommend the site to others. At Pier-2, this idea was central to its mandate of art education and public engagement. Once a month, we opened our studio to the public, inviting visitors to step inside and take in our hand-drawn storyboards and walls covered with photographs.

The study also found that “creativity in practice” lends a sense of uniqueness to a destination, heightening visitor satisfaction and emotional attachment. Those positive experiences in turn bolster the site’s reputation and suggest that sustained creativity can keep audiences coming back.

To put this principle into practice, Pier-2 limits how long tenants can occupy certain spaces. Artists-in-residence rotate regularly, with stays capped at 85 days; retailers in parts of the Dayi C9 Warehouse cluster are restricted to three months; and designated areas host rotating exhibitions. The model ensures a constant sense of novelty, keeping the attractions fresh, creative, and appealing.

Art as a language

Our residency at Pier-2 concluded in an immersive multimedia exhibition exploring the theme of cultural inheritance. Visitors passed through environmental projections, casting their own shadows over video portraits of Kaohsiung’s people and landscapes. At the end of the exhibition, we posed a question to visitors as text on a wall: What do you hope to pass on to the future?

Over 2,000 people answered during the exhibition’s nine-day run, filling pink, yellow, and green sticky notes with sketches of family and wishes for peace, happiness, and health. Some expressed worries about politics and the summer recall election, while others shared hopes of getting into university or finding self-love.

“Artwork is another language,” says Pier-2’s Huang. “It asks a question, instead of providing a solution, to get people to think about an idea.”

Our question about cultural inheritance arose in large part because of what we saw other artists and community members grappling with across different localities in Taiwan: How do we balance cultural preservation with economic development? How do we continue to secure our future? What does it mean to be Taiwanese?

“Taiwan’s art scene represents creativity and responsiveness shaped by the intersection of history and diverse cultures,” says KAT’s He. “Artistic practices cover a wide range of themes, including identity, land, and technology — reflecting a cultural energy that is both free and shaped by layers of historical context.”

For us, the goal was not to arrive at an answer but to pose the question, creating work grounded in the lives of everyday people that encouraged reflection and appreciation for both us and those around us.