New Ecological Art Environment: Seven Years in the 400-Ping Old House on Yongfu Road, Ahead of the Funding Structure

30-second overview: In June 1992, Tu Chao-hsien, who had originally run a home-decor gallery, opened New Ecological Art Environment in an old building of more than 400 ping on Section 2 of Yongfu Road in Tainan. It exhibited contemporary art, screened documentaries, staged small-theater performances, and sold coffee. The National Culture and Arts Foundation had not yet been established, Tainan National University of the Arts had not yet opened, and the Council for Cultural Affairs' "reuse of idle spaces" policy had not yet come online. It lasted seven years. By the time it went dark in 1999, the institutional nervous system of Taiwanese contemporary art was just beginning to grow: it had run ahead of every funding structure, and by the time funding finally entered the scene, self-operated spaces of this kind were instead leaving it.

The Building at No. 138, Section 2, Yongfu Road

In 1992, Section 2 of Yongfu Road in Tainan still had none of the graffiti later associated with Hai'an Road's art-based street-making, none of B.B.ART's neon, and none of the tourist crowds of Blueprint Culture and Creative Park. An old building of more than 400 ping on Yongfu Road had sat idle for a long time. Tu Chao-hsien rented it and hung up the sign for "New Ecological Art Environment."¹

Push open the entrance and there was a gallery. The first floor also had a bookstore and a cafe; the second floor was an exhibition space and small theater; the basement could screen documentaries. One space packed in contemporary art, performing arts, documentary film, literature, and coffee. In Tainan at the time, there was no precedent for this. Tainan's galleries were commercial spaces that sold paintings; Taipei's alternative spaces, such as IT Park and Apartment No. 2, were mostly artist-run, single-function sites. New Ecological took a composite approach, for a very practical reason: a pure exhibition space could not survive in Tainan.²

Tu Chao-hsien came from a Tainan family of jewelers. "He often said that looking at gemstones more could absorb 'gem energy' and cultivate one's eye, so from childhood I would pay attention to everything beautiful," she recalled of her father.³ In 1984, she opened "Shih Pao Fang Living Professional Space," selling home decor while also going to Taipei to buy reproduction paintings; it was Tainan's second gallery. From home decor to gallery, and from gallery to composite art space, her trajectory moved from the commercial margins toward the core of contemporary art, not the other way around.

An Extra-Institutional Space Born on the Eve of the Institution's Arrival

When New Ecological opened in 1992, the funding structure for contemporary art in Taiwan was almost empty.

Although the Council for Cultural Affairs had been established in 1981, subsidies in the early 1990s mainly operated through applications for individual projects. There was no regular institutional subsidy aimed at alternative spaces. The National Culture and Arts Foundation would not be established until 1996, and only then did "regular subsidies for visual arts" formally incorporate alternative spaces into the system.⁴ Tainan National College of the Arts, later Tainan National University of the Arts, was also established only in 1996. At first it had only four graduate institutes: plastic arts, sound and image documentation, museum studies, and art history and criticism. The department of fine arts was established later.⁵ The Council for Cultural Affairs' "reuse of idle spaces" policy would not commission an assessment from Tunghai University's Department of Architecture until 1997. The "Railway Art Network" project came online only in 2000, and the Chiayi Railway Art Village opened only in 2002.⁶ Kaohsiung's Pier-2 Art Center saw the establishment of an association only in 2001 and opened only in 2002.⁷

📝 Curator's Note
The conventional account says that "Taiwanese alternative spaces in the 1990s flourished with the support of cultural subsidies." But this narrative reverses the chronology. When New Ecological opened in 1992, the funding structure had not yet grown into place. When that funding structure finally arrived, with the NCAF in 1996, the Railway Art Network in 2000, and Pier-2 in 2002, self-operated composite spaces of this kind instead began to exit. New Ecological was not a product of the funding structure. It was an incubator before that structure had grown.

In other words: the seven years of New Ecological's life, from 1992 to 1999, coincided exactly with the gap in which Taiwanese contemporary art was moving from an "exhibition-hall system," centered on the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and supplemented by commercial galleries, to an "institutional system" composed of the NCAF, national arts universities, and government policies for idle spaces. It was a representative species of that gap.

A Single Person in Charge, with Cheng Ming-chuan as Artistic Director

Early oral history around INBOX once circulated a story that New Ecological was co-founded by a trio, placing Chiang Yao-hsien, Yeh Chu-sheng, and Tu Chao-hsien together. But when one returns to first-hand files: Yeh Hsing-jou's long 2023 essay in No Man's Land, the Taiwan Art Gallery Association database TAGA, and the Taiwan Contemporary Art Archive TCAA, the record is consistent: the founder was Tu Chao-hsien alone, and the artistic director was Cheng Ming-chuan.¹⁸⁹

This is not nitpicking. The problem with the trio narrative is that it assumes the Tainan alternative space of the 1990s followed an "artist-run" model. That assumption comes from Taipei's IT Park, co-founded in 1988 by the four artists Liu Ching-tang, Tsong Pu, Chen Hui-chiao, and Huang Wen-hao,¹⁰ and Apartment No. 2, formed in 1989 by artist members including Wu Mali, Fan Chiang Ming-dao, Yeh Tzu-chi, and Lin Hung-wen.¹¹ Taipei's alternative spaces were self-run artist collectives. Tainan's New Ecological, however, was led by a planner with a commercial background who hired a professional artistic director to carry out the program. These were two different ecologies of alternative space.

"In that era we could not get into museums, and there were no opportunities within the system, so we created spaces outside the system," Wu Mali explained of the logic behind Apartment No. 2's founding.¹¹ In 1991, Apartment No. 2 even moved directly into Exhibition Room B04 of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum with "Apartment--1991," the first installment of the "Avant-garde / Experiment" series. That was the posture of artists attacking the institution from outside. New Ecological's posture was different. It was not trying to break into the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. It was building a miniature institution of its own in Tainan: contemporary art, documentaries, and small theater all resolved on a single street.

The Social Movement Documentary Exhibition in the Summer of 1992

Not long after opening, New Ecological organized "Voices from the Margins: Taiwan Social Movement Documentary Film Exhibition."¹ In 1992, only five years had passed since martial law was lifted, only four years since the lifting of the newspaper ban in 1988, and only two years since the end of the Government Information Office's song censorship system in 1990. Documentary images of social movements had not yet entered mainstream distribution channels. They mostly circulated within small circles of independent documentary workers and social movement groups.

New Ecological brought these films to Tainan and put them inside a space that sold coffee and also operated as a gallery. In Taipei, the venues for doing this had long existed, from Green Team to Third Image Workshop. But Tainan did not have them. For Tainan audiences in 1992, this was a scene of displacement: "an art space screening social movement documentaries." Yet that displacement itself was New Ecological's proposition.

💡 Did You Know
Taiwan's contemporary art circles habitually anchor the chronology of "alternative spaces" in 1988, with IT Park, and 1989, with Apartment No. 2. But both were in Taipei. New Ecological opened in 1992, three to four years later than those two, yet it was the first alternative space outside Taipei with a complete contemporary-art discursive energy. Before this, contemporary art in Tainan, Taichung, and Kaohsiung could only look toward Taipei.

A Turning Point Five Years Later: "Images of Tainan" in 1995

In its fourth year of operation, New Ecological staged an exhibition called "Images of Tainan: Voting on Key Spatial Resources in Tainan."¹ On the surface, it was a contemporary art exhibition. In practice, it was a civic participation project: citizens were invited to vote on which spaces should be preserved, which buildings were worth transforming, and which districts constituted Tainan's contemporary image.

This exhibition foreshadowed Tu Chao-hsien's later career trajectory. After New Ecological went dark in 1999, she went to study at the San Francisco Art Institute. After returning to Taiwan, she no longer operated a "gallery" in the traditional sense. She began working with entire streets.¹²

INART, established in 2007, and the "Hai'an Road Art Street-Making" project incubated around the same period, moved art from indoor exhibition spaces into city streets.¹³ B.B.ART, founded in 2012, transformed an old building on Minquan Road that had formerly housed Tainan Hwayang Department Store into a composite space.¹⁴ Its logic was of a piece with New Ecological's 1992 transformation of the old house on Yongfu Road. The difference was that the scale expanded from one building to one street, and then to an urban district.

📝 Curator's Note
The conventional explanation writes Tu Chao-hsien's trajectory as a move "from alternative space toward public art." A more precise reading is that what she did from beginning to end was "insert art into existing urban scenes." In 1992, she inserted it into an old building; in 2007, into a street; in 2012, into a city district. New Ecological was the first place where her methodology became fully visible, and every later space reworked the same thing.

The 1996 "Local and International Interactive Experiment" with Eslite

From February 2 to 4, 1996, New Ecological and the basement level of Taipei's Eslite Dunnan Store co-organized a cross-city event called "Local and International Interactive Experiment." Performers included Gang-a Tsui Theater, Angry Swamp, and The Clippers.¹

The Clippers had just formed at that time, and lead singer Hsiao Ying was still accumulating his stage charisma. Angry Swamp was representative of experimental music in the late 1990s. Gang-a Tsui Theater was founded by Chou Yi-chang in 1993 and was then a newly emerging experimental theater of nanguan, a traditional southern Chinese music genre historically important in Taiwan. Bringing the three groups together crossed nanguan, underground rock, and experimental noise. This kind of mixed, cross-genre event was rare in 1996.

In the same period in Taipei, in 1995, Huang Wen-hao had just extended from IT Park to found "ETAT," shifting the direction of experimentation from visual art toward the internet, media, and new media art.¹⁵ The two timelines are interesting when placed side by side:

1988  IT Park on Taipei's Yitong Street -- artist-run, pure visual art
1989  Apartment No. 2 on Taipei's Xinsheng South Road -- artist-run, crossing performance and installation
1992  New Ecological Art Environment on Tainan's Yongfu Road -- planned by a figure with a commercial background, composite format (gallery + small theater + documentaries + cafe)
1995  ETAT in Taipei -- also led by Huang Wen-hao, but turned toward new media and internet art
1996  National Culture and Arts Foundation established; Tainan National College of the Arts founded
1999  New Ecological goes dark
2000  Railway Art Network comes online
2001  Pier-2 Art Development Association established
2002  Chiayi Station of the Railway Art Network opens; Pier-2 Art Center opens

Across the fourteen years from 1988 to 2002, Taiwan's alternative spaces evolved from "artist-initiated" to "taken over by government idle-space policy." New Ecological sat precisely in the middle of this transition. Its survival strategy, composite management, cross-disciplinary programming, and refusal to depend on a single subsidy, was a third route between Taipei's self-operated model and the model of government policy takeover, one that has never been fully named.

At the time, this third route had no ready-made vocabulary. Although the concept of "alternative space" circulated in Taiwan's art world in the 1990s, it mainly described the Taipei IT Park model: "artists cannot enter the system, so they do it themselves." New Ecological's situation was different. Tu Chao-hsien herself was a commercial gallery operator. She was not trying to oppose the system. She chose to mix the commercial and the non-commercial in the same composite space. Gallery revenue supported documentary screenings; cafe foot traffic drove exhibition attendance; bookstore shelves displayed tickets for experimental theater. This economic model was reinvented in the 2010s by Eslite, VVG, and the wave of old-house renovations in Tainan. Its actual inventor was Tu Chao-hsien in 1992.

This invention grew while being made. There was no prior theory. An old building of more than 400 ping needed an economic logic to be sustained. A purely artist-run space could not have lasted in Tainan. Unlike Taipei, Tainan did not have a large number of collectors; unlike Kaohsiung, it did not have public-sector resources. The only way to sustain a space of this scale was a compromise of "commercial + non-commercial" mixing. New Ecological was, in effect, a large-scale experiment in Tainan's art economy in the 1990s. That experiment came to an end in 1999, but its results continued to be used by those who came later.

The 1997 Move and the 1999 Closure

In 1997, Tu Chao-hsien moved the space from Yongfu Road to No. 261, Section 2, Minquan Road,⁸ and in the same year she stepped down from the position of director. New Ecological continued operating until 1999.¹ It then went dark.

Different sources diverge on the year it ended. No Man's Land, in Yeh Hsing-jou's 2023 essay, gives 1999; the Taiwan Art Gallery Association database TAGA gives 1992-1997; verymulan writes that Tu Chao-hsien left the position in 1997 and went to San Francisco. The most reasonable integration is: Tu Chao-hsien exited in 1997, and New Ecological's core planning energy shifted with her, but the space continued in a weakened state until it went dark in 1999.¹⁸¹⁶

The timing of its closure landed exactly on the threshold of the "institutionalization" of Taiwanese contemporary art. The NCAF's regular subsidies had just begun to get on track; the first cohort of graduate students at Tainan National College of the Arts had only just graduated; the Council for Cultural Affairs' idle-space policy had only just begun. As an "incubator before the birth of the funding structure," New Ecological had completed its mission. It did not grow into a larger institution. Instead, it exited on time, leaving the stage to the coming government idle-space policies and academic system.

After the 2000s: New Ecological's Spores

In the twenty years after New Ecological went dark, the landscape of alternative spaces in Tainan was not blank. If one lines up Tainan's art and cultural spaces across this period, most can be seen to have direct or indirect connections to New Ecological's DNA.

Tu Chao-hsien herself extended her practice into INART in 2007, the Hai'an Road Art Street-Making project, incubated in the 2000s and awarded the Taishin Arts Award Jury's Special Award in 2004, and B.B.ART in 2012.¹³¹⁴¹⁷

182artspace, established in 2008 and led by photographers Chen Po-I, Wang Cheng-hsiang, and others, inherited New Ecological's "cross-disciplinary composite" spirit, putting photography, books, moving images, and experimental music into the same space.¹⁸ Kaohsiung's Pier-2 in 2002 and Qiaotou Sugar Refinery in the late 2000s inherited the policy-driven model of "idle space + artist residency."

⚠️ Contested View
To describe New Ecological as "the source of all alternative spaces in Tainan" is a retrospective arrangement. In reality, New Ecological was not the only composite space in 1990s Tainan. At the same time there were also Tu Chao-hsien's own Shih Pao Fang, extensions of the art-gallery system, and various short-lived small spaces. New Ecological became a representative node partly because it was larger and lasted longer, and partly because its planner remained active for another thirty years, repeatedly narrating this history through later spatial experience. Historical representativeness is related to the survival rate of its narrators. This principle applies not only to New Ecological.

Why We Are Still Talking About This Seven-Year Space Today

In 2023, No Man's Land published Yeh Hsing-jou's long essay, "An Alternative Space Leveraged by a Gallery: New Ecological Art Environment in 1990s Tainan," bringing this 1990s Tainan story, refrigerated for twenty years, back onto the table.¹ In the same year, the NCAF archive released the results of Sasame Art Workshop's research project, "The Return of Alternative Space: A Study of Early Art and Cultural Space Development in Tainan--'Marginal Culture' (1992-1995),"¹⁹ which included members' handwritten journals from 1992 to 1995, promotional materials from exhibitions, photographs of two relocated spaces, photographs of exhibitions and member activities, advertisements and newspaper and magazine reviews published at the time, as well as interview transcripts and audiovisual materials relating to all members. This is currently the most complete scholarly revisit archive for New Ecological.

Yeh Hsing-jou herself is a long-term contributor to No Man's Land. Her 2023 essay "An Alternative Space Leveraged by a Gallery" is one of forty articles in her "Sound Scene" series, which covers the archaeology of non-mainstream art and cultural spaces in Taiwan from the 1990s to the 2020s. This series is regarded as the most complete secondary-source integration of the history of Taiwan's 1990s alternative spaces. Her perspective on New Ecological leans toward methodological archaeology. The framework of "leveraging a gallery" reevaluates the case: using a commercial gallery as a fulcrum to support a non-commercial art and cultural ecosystem larger than the gallery itself. This perspective turns New Ecological from "an alternative space that once existed" into "a historical case of methodology."

This archaeological wave of the 2020s is not nostalgia. It is connected to two phenomena in Taiwanese contemporary art today.

First, the funding structures of the NCAF and the Ministry of Culture became increasingly complete in the 2020s, while self-operated spaces became increasingly difficult to run outside the subsidy system. When subsidies become a necessary condition for survival, alternative spaces outside the funding structure become an endangered species. Looking back at New Ecological, the point is not how it survived, but how it could still operate for seven years without a funding structure.

Second, in recent years, because of tourism fever and urban renewal in Tainan, the southward movement of contemporary art has connected Tainan into a new node. Hai'an Road, Shennong Street, Blueprint, 321 Art Alley Settlement: most of today's Tainan art and cultural landscape can be traced back to the old building at No. 138, Section 2, Yongfu Road, in 1992. A seven-year space scattered spores for thirty years.

From New Ecological's closure in 1999 to the present moment in 2026, the NCAF's regular subsidies have run for thirty years, Tainan National University of the Arts has been open for thirty years, and the Railway Art Network has turned for twenty-six years. What 1990s alternative spaces left behind has been absorbed into institutions and into urban memory.

The old building of more than 400 ping is still at No. 138, Section 2, Yongfu Road. Only the sign "New Ecological Art Environment" no longer hangs below the house number. But every time someone in Tainan wants to open a new space, wants to run a cross-disciplinary composite operation, or wants to survive outside the funding structure, what they are doing is essentially the same thing Tu Chao-hsien did that summer in 1992.

Seven years was so short, yet the spores scattered for thirty years. The next time you pass the old building on Section 2 of Yongfu Road, remember to look up at the second-floor windows. In 1992, that floor was Tainan's first small theater; in 1993, it screened social movement documentaries; in 1996, it linked with Eslite across cities to stage cross-genre experimental performances. There is no sign indicating that these things once happened there. But this is the historical landscape of Taiwanese contemporary art: it is not always in museums. It is also in an ordinary-looking old house on Yongfu Road.

Further Reading:

• Taiwanese Contemporary Art -- the overall context of Taiwanese contemporary art after the lifting of martial law; New Ecological is a representative node in southern Taiwan during this period
• Taiwanese Curators and the Construction of Art and Culture -- the localization of curatorial concepts in Taiwan in the 1990s; Cheng Ming-chuan of New Ecological is one example
• Taiwanese New Media Art -- in the same period, Huang Wen-hao extended from IT Park to found ETAT, a parallel case from 1995

Image Sources

This article uses no images at the time of shipping. Publicly available digitized materials from New Ecological Art Environment's 1992-1999 period, including exhibition installation photographs and images of the space's exterior, are currently extremely scarce. Most are held in the No Man's Land archive, the NCAF Sasame Art Workshop research project, and the Tainan Art Museum's archive of 1990s Tainan art spaces, and have not been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Images may be added in the future if authorization is obtained, per the "no suitable media material" boundary exception in REWRITE-PIPELINE Stage 4 Step 4.3.

References