Leading a busy life, we tend to ignore some of the most fundamental things that happen every moment around us. To retrieve those stunning but invisible slices of life, you are strongly suggested to walk through the gallery of Chuang Shen (創甡). 

Chuang Shen, literally meaning dynamic creations, is the exhibition hosted by the class 2016 students of Cultural Vocation Development. It deals with the ubiquitous Taiwanese culture rooted in daily life and is showing how the seemingly never-changing life secretly wears some unspoken beauty.

The exhibition is featured with four main themes: Amid Lands, Amid Times, Amid Hands, and Amid People. It includes thirty-four artworks that suggest how we are attached to the land, what we objectively look like in modern life, to what extent a craft can be exquisitely done, and how chemistry is generated amid the interaction among people.

Chun Feng Xian Yu (春風弦雨)– meaning music in the breezy spring, is the comic work of Yu-Ting Huang, which tells the story of Yu-Hsien Teng, father of Taiwanese folk music.

“It took much time to initiate the script,” said Huang. “It requires an in-depth study on the history, characters’ building, and plotting before I could pencil down the storyboard.”

To enrich the content, Huang reached to Teng’s descendants and some collectors for detailed information. “The Songs of Soil”, the TV episodes about Teng’s story, is also the crucial reference for the comic script to show the production of the phonograph record and the recording studio back then. Thanks to her efforts in the study, she was even chosen as one of the planners for Teng’s exhibition hosted by the Taipei City Government.

Xin Nuxing (芯女性) is the name for the bamboo weaving lantern designed by Man-Ling Liu and Wei-Zhen Tang. The idea was inspired from Haiyin Lin’s novel, “The Pleated Skirt of Golden Carps”, which describes the dilemma and enlightenment of females in the early 1990s. The lantern, which has its illumination surrounded by the bamboo stripes, embodies the rights and courage of females, though suppressed, still gently luminant under a male chauvinistic society.

With the skills passed from Hsien-Ping Chang – the Taiwanese bamboo weaving master, Liu and Tang infuse modern technology into the Taiwanese deeply held traditional art.

Yu-Fang Zeng comes from Huatan in Changhua County, also known as the home of red bricks. Zeng turns this tend-to-be building material into the paper-weights – one of the indispensable writing tools in Chinese calligraphy. The color red stands for good fortune and gives a new look to the traditional stationery.