Neiwei Arts Center
Liu Pei-sen (architect) · Opened 2022
Next to the light rail station a long white building seems to hover above the ground, its underside scooped into deep curved arches and its upper storey a band of dark glass tilted outward like the brim of a hat. It looks like a ship or a spacecraft that has landed among the trees, and it could hardly be more different from the brick museum across the park. This is the Neiwei Arts Center, opened in two thousand and twenty two and run by the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts as a place for exhibitions, films, performances and simply for people to sit, read and drink coffee.
The architect was Liu Pei-sen, a Kaohsiung-born designer who has built several public buildings in the south of Taiwan, and the brief was for a cultural living room rather than a museum: the ground floor is largely open and free, with a bookshop, a cafe, an art cinema and spaces for children, while the galleries are on the upper level. Look at the way the arches of the ground floor frame the park and the museum beyond, so that you seem to walk through the building rather than into it. The white surfaces were chosen to reflect the heat and to glow under the evening lighting.
The centre was built to catch the flow of visitors arriving by the new circular light rail, and it has succeeded; on weekends it is often busier than the main building. If you arrive by tram, this is your first stop: pick up a map here, see what is on, and then walk through the sculpture park to the museum. In the evening, when the museum has closed, the arts centre stays open later and the lit arches are a favourite spot for photographs.
Did You Know? The building was designed as a cultural living room, with a free ground floor of cafe, bookshop and cinema, so that the art galleries sit above a public street.
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