ALIEN Art Centre — From Military Farewell Station to Art Sanctuary
A building constructed in 1967 to house soldiers before they boarded warships to the frontline islands of Kinmen and Matsu. For thirty-one years it witnessed goodbyes and reunions. Then it was forgotten for twenty more — until a father-daughter duo turned it into what Lonely Planet calls Kaohsiung's top contemporary art destination.
An Unlikely Transformation
Stand at the entrance of 111 Gushan 1st Road in Kaohsiung, and you'll see a grey building embraced by the forests of Shoushan Mountain. Light falls through an open courtyard corridor, and inside, a retrospective of an Italian Op Art master fills the galleries. Nothing about this scene suggests that sixty years ago, twenty-year-old soldiers stood in this same corridor waiting to board ships to the frontline, their mothers crying at the gate, while the navy's LST vessels rocked in Kaohsiung Harbor for the thirty-six-hour crossing to Kinmen.
This is Taiwan's last surviving Cold War-era Jinma Guest House. The one in Keelung was demolished. The Kaohsiung one survived — not because anyone chose to preserve it, but because it was forgotten long enough for someone to eventually notice.
Three Lives of a Building
First Life: Farewells and Reunions (1967–1998)
The year after the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis (the "823 Artillery Bombardment"), the Kaohsiung city government decided to build a transit station for soldiers heading to the Kinmen and Matsu frontlines. The construction site was reclaimed fishponds — they had to wait eight years for the ground to settle.
On September 26, 1967, the Jinma Guest House opened, built by the Armed Forces Fraternity Association at a cost of NT$12 million. "Jin" (金) stands for Kinmen, "Ma" (馬) for Matsu. On the Cold War map, these islands occupied the same geopolitical weight as the Berlin Wall and the 38th parallel.
Soldiers who had drawn the dreaded "Jinma lottery" — every Taiwanese man of that era understood the weight of those words — traveled from across the island to report at this building. They waited for clear weather to sail. On the road to the harbor, shop clerks shouted: "The voyage takes a day and a half, there's no food on board — buy now!" The recruits scrambled for bread, soda, and above all, seasickness pills.
For thirty-one years, the Jinma Guest House witnessed countless departures and returns. Some farewells lasted a year; some, forever.
Second Life: Forgotten (1998–2016)
As Cross-Strait tensions eased, the guest house was decommissioned in 1998. The building was handed to the Railway Reconstruction Bureau as its Kaohsiung underground railway headquarters. When the bureau relocated in 2012, the building — carrying half a century of memory — was simply left at the foot of Shoushan Mountain, weeds climbing its corridors.
The Keelung Jinma Guest House was demolished during this period. The Kaohsiung one survived only because its turn hadn't come yet.
Third Life: Light in the Ruins (2016–2018)
In 2016, Kaohsiung's Urban Development Bureau put the site up for public tender. When Shao Yung-Tien, founder of the YUIMOM Group, and his daughter Shao Ya-Man (Yaman Shao) first walked in, they found "practically a ruin." Every fixture was decrepit. The building had been thoroughly forgotten.
But Yaman was drawn to the light.
"Looking out from the museum windows, the forest and blue sky weave together in a way that makes you feel you're deep in the mountains, far from the noise of the city," she told VERSE magazine. A military building, thanks to its proximity to Shoushan, had accidentally acquired the natural setting most urban museums can only dream of.
The restoration team hired veteran craftsmen to work with traditional techniques, recovering the building's original pebble-wash and terrazzo textures. They even tracked down discontinued white ceramic tiles to rebuild the corridors. But the biggest change was structural: they opened the closed U-shaped military barracks into an open square courtyard, letting wind and light flow freely, and letting the galleries breathe with Shoushan's forest.
On November 28, 2018, the Jinma Guest House reopened as ALIEN Art Centre.
Why "ALIEN"?
The English name sounds like it belongs to a science fiction museum, but the inspiration comes from Spielberg's E.T. — specifically, the moment when two fingers touch across the unknown. The team explains: "ALIEN carries the meaning of reaching toward the unknown."
The name accidentally mirrors the building's history. In 1967, the soldiers standing in these halls were also facing the unknown — the unknown across the strait, the unknown of war, the unknown of whether they'd return. Fifty years later, visitors in the same building face a different kind of unknown: the perceptual frontiers opened by contemporary art.
A Father-Daughter Vision
The driving force behind ALIEN Art Centre is an unusual father-daughter partnership. Father Shao Yung-Tien, the YUIMOM Group founder, didn't start painting until his sixties — then produced over 200 works in barely a year, even inventing his own brushes and tools. Daughter Yaman Shao took on the role of executive director of ALIEN Art in her late twenties, with the ambition of curating at international standards.
Their 2020 exhibition Mad · Zen was their first joint show, spanning both the Jinma Guest House and the Silks Club hotel. The father's "madness" — business philosophy, raw creative energy — met the daughter's "zen" — introspection, serenity, aesthetic refinement — in a cross-generational dialogue that embodied what the museum stands for.
International Recognition
Within two years of opening, the museum won Shopping Design magazine's 2019 "Best 100 Cultural Landscape" award. In 2020, Lonely Planet named it Kaohsiung's top art destination — a remarkable achievement for a privately funded museum outside Taipei.
Notable exhibitions have included Arman: Thinking Objects (2022–2023), co-curated with French curator Jérôme Neutres; Responsive Vision: Getulio Alviani (2023–2024), the Italian Op Art pioneer's first comprehensive retrospective in East Asia; and Infinite Voyage: Shao Yung-Tien, which combined AI-generated imagery with interactive music.
Running a private museum in Kaohsiung — not Taipei — at a NT$250 admission fee presents real challenges. Yaman's response has been to go global: collaborating with art institutions in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Amsterdam, London, and New York, exporting Taiwan's curatorial energy to the international stage.
The Building as Exhibit
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about ALIEN Art Centre isn't what hangs on its walls, but the walls themselves.
The façade blends three architectural lineages: Western modernist minimalism from Taiwan's 1960s economic boom, traces of Japanese colonial-era eclectic classicism, and Chinese classical architectural symbols. Architectural historians note that its geometric compositions echo Mies van der Rohe.
The restoration used formaldehyde-free paint, non-endocrine-disrupting materials, and recycled wood fixtures, making this sixty-year-old building a model for low-carbon green architecture in Kaohsiung. The plants seeded at opening have since merged with Shoushan's forest, sealing the museum off from urban noise.
From a station of farewell to a sanctuary of art — the story of the Jinma Guest House is itself the most powerful exhibit: about memory, forgetting, and rebirth.
References
- ALIEN Art Centre Official — Building History (primary source: Kaohsiung Museum of History archives, 1959/1967 newspaper citations)
- Wikipedia — ALIEN Art Centre
- VERSE Magazine — From Military Station to Art Temple (Yaman Shao interview)
- Kaohsiung Pictorial — Green Low-Carbon Aesthetics (2024, Lonely Planet recommendation, curatorial axes)
- Shopping Design — Lonely Planet Recommends ALIEN Art Centre (2020)
- Lonely Planet — ALIEN Art Centre (English source, international travel guide)
- 500 Times — Yaman Shao: A Composed 28-Year-Old CEO (2021)
- 500 Times — Mad · Zen Exhibition (2020)
- Tatler Asia — Shao Yung-Tien and Yaman Shao (2024)
- Harper's BAZAAR — 13 Must-Visit Art Buildings in Kaohsiung (2025)
- ELLE — Responsive Vision: Getulio Alviani at ALIEN Art Centre (2023)
- YUIMOM Group — ALIEN Art Centre