Topic

Museums, as an important aspect of the rise of professional skills of modernity, have carried out complex practices combining the spirit of exploration in everyday life, aesthetic experiences, socio-cultural understanding and etc.

If calculated from the erection of the predecessor of the National Taiwan Museum, the Taiwan Governor Museum, in 1908, it could be said that the establishment of Taiwan’s national museums can be dated back to nearly ninety years ago. However, it was not until the 1990s, when the Executive Yuan took on the Twelve Construction Projects, that the overall development of Taiwan’s museums commenced.

Several large-scale museums, which became the envy of the world with the large investment in hardware facilities, were established one after another, and they pushed forward a wave of new museum conceptions. There were plans for the expansion or establishment of province-based and municipality-based museums, contributing to a new state in culture and politics. “Specialized museums” in the cultural centers of every county and city gradually matured, while exhibition rooms or museums related to local history and culture will also make an appearance within the trend of “discovery and reconstruction of history” along with the establishment of local culture and history studios. Moreover, we cannot neglect those private art galleries or museums, affiliated museums of industries, and archive-like museums or exhibition halls set up by various types of organizations.

The outset of Taiwan’s museum enterprise not only includes a series of views and attitudes about the world, but also involves the complicated expansion of industrial production and market economy capitalism, the independently run national and democratic system, the reformation of science and technology and other issues of modernity. However, how is the museum entity interpreted in Taiwan? How, then, do museums interfere with the construction of knowledge and narratives about modernity in Taiwan?

Subthemes

1.The characters of different types of museums and their forms of social and cultural practices in the course of history.

2.The nature of the knowledge construction of related disciplines in the realm of museums.

3.The interpretation of museum entity by Taiwan’s regional/cultural/local science.

4.The relationship between Taiwan’s museums and modernity in a global context.