Taiwan’s Rainbow Village artworks lost amid renovation, fire
A few of Taiwan’s most famous visual and performance arts pieces are being closed to the public as a result of a series of renovations and related fires.
Among them are the Rainbow Village artworks of the late Taiwanese artist Ko Kuan-chang. The National Palace Museum has acquired a collection of 20 prints by Ko, most of which have been donated to Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art.
Ko won international acclaim as a printmaker in the 1920s. He was the country’s first modernist artist, and many of his prints are now very highly valued by collectors and art dealers around the world.
He is also widely considered the greatest painter of the Taiwanese Renaissance.
The Rainbow Village was made up of over 4,000 print works, which were hung in an open-air gallery in Taipei. They displayed a wide variety of abstract or cubist images, surrealism, and non-traditional art forms — works created by many masters from the previous century.
After the National Palace Museum was established in Taipei in 1976, the Rainbow Village received international recognition.
In 1985, it was listed among the World Art Treasures of UNESCO, a list established for cultural properties that preserve the traditional arts of different countries. It also achieved inclusion in the Book of Records with its ranking as the most visited museum in the world. It was visited by more than 8.5 million visitors each year.
But now the Rainbow Village and many of the museum’s other artworks have been closed under a renovation project.
Over 1,000 artworks are now to be completely stripped down — a process that is expected to take several years.
While the Rainbow Village would be preserved as is in the end, several of the museum’s other paintings and sculptures are also being gutted.
The Rainbow Village will be preserved by opening a temporary museum to house