Taiwanese Sensibility: Do We Need Koreans to Like It First Before We Dare Say Our Old Houses Are Beautiful?

30-Second Overview: “대만감성 (Taiwanese sensibility)” is the name young Koreans gave to Taiwan's streetscapes: decorative iron window grilles, terrazzo floors, alleys packed with parked scooters. The very things Taiwanese people find shabby and want to tear down have become, through Korean lenses, the scenery they most want to collect. But the Korean word “감성” actually means “the capacity to be moved”; its subject is the person doing the feeling, not the place being photographed. What this piece wants to ask is: if the one being moved can just as well be a Taiwanese person, why do we wait for someone else to see it first before we dare admit that the streets we walk past every day were already beautiful?

Decorative iron window grilles at the Sanhe Hotel in Changhua. When Taiwanese people see these hand-bent black iron grilles, what comes to mind is whether it's time to replace them with aluminum windows; when Koreans see them, they photograph them and tag them #대만감성. Photo: Outlookxp / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One or Two Thousand Photos, and a Miscounted Word

In 2013, two men from Kaohsiung drove a car through the alleys of Tainan, photographing decorative iron window grilles one by one.

Hsin Yung-sheng and Yang Chao-ching met through the Kaohsiung Container Arts Festival and discovered that both of their cameras kept turning, without either quite meaning it, toward old houses¹. They founded the studio Old House Face and decided to start from Tainan, documenting the faces of old houses across all of Taiwan one by one. In just half a year, the two of them had photographed one to two thousand decorative iron window grilles, each with a distinctive pattern¹.

One to two thousand photos. That number quietly warped with each retelling: "photos" (張, the counter for flat, sheet-like objects) turned into "types" (種, the counter for kinds or categories), and before long the story going around was that "Old House Face photographed two thousand types of iron window grille patterns in half a year." The difference sounds small. It isn't: "one to two thousand photos" is fieldwork that two people produced by carrying cameras through the streets; "two thousand types of patterns" is a statistic that sounds impressively precise but that no one ever actually counted. Even the way we record our own culture can quietly grow an unverified version of itself with each retelling. That is the first thread this article will keep pulling on.

The biography of the decorative iron window grille itself is just as easy to get wrong. It is not a Taiwanese specialty that appeared out of nowhere in the 1960s. As early as the 1920s, iron window grilles arrived in Taiwan alongside Western-style modern architecture, driven by early demand for burglar-proofing; they did not become standard equipment in every household until the economic takeoff of the 1950s and '60s². Blacksmiths welded, forged, and hand-bent a different set of geometric lines, flowers, birds, fish, and insects for each household; no two windows were ever quite alike. A grille was at once a bar against burglars and, in a fire, an obstacle blocking the escape route. Practicality and danger were, from the start, the same object.

As for when the craft began to disappear, the firsthand account does not match what circulates secondhand. Wikipedia and a number of news reports say it "declined after the 1980s," but the two founders of Old House Face, writing in their own words, put it more precisely: this "consummate craft in fact disappeared rapidly after the 1990s," losing out to galvanized sheet metal (stainless steel), which needed no paint or upkeep and cost less³. The very people who did the fieldwork by hand give a date a full decade later than the secondhand version.

📝 Curator's Note
Hold onto this small distortion, "photos" turning into "types." You'll soon see that the way Korea talks about "대만감성" has drifted the same way: a word dropped from an endorsement slogan, a book fair's attendance figure crowned "the highest ever." The more a phenomenon catches fire, the more likely the story about it is to grow an unverified version. What this article does, start to finish, is trace each of these warped numbers back to what they actually were.

Terrazzo faded out alongside the decorative iron window grille. This cool-underfoot flooring originated in Venice, Italy, and was introduced to Taiwan by the Japanese during the colonial period; the exact year is no longer traceable, but its heyday ran from the 1950s to the 1980s, when it was laid everywhere: houses, temples, schools, and government buildings alike⁴.

Terrazzo flooring at Jin'an Temple in Su'ao, Yilan. Masons mixed crushed stone into cement mortar, then ground and polished it over and over until this cool geometric mosaic emerged. Photo: Tsai Ming-chih, Lin Li-chen / Yilan County Government Department of Cultural Affairs, CC BY 3.0 TW.

The real situation facing these crafts lives in the people who still practice them. Tseng Wen-chang, a decorative-iron-window craftsman in Xindian with more than thirty years in the trade, gave a reporter an honest tally: "Of every ten jobs, five lose money." Then he added: "But it doesn't matter whether I make money on it or not, really."⁵ Terrazzo craftsman Wang Chin-erh put it more bluntly: "Hardly anyone does this anymore. These days there are at most a dozen or so people left in all of Tainan."⁶ We treat decorative iron window grilles and terrazzo floors as aesthetic objects worth being nostalgic over, while rarely looking at whether the people who still make them can actually get by. This thread will come back later in this article.

But what Old House Face really set out to do was never just to photograph vanishing things for the record.

Eleven Years Ago, We Already Saw It Ourselves

Old House Face's founding year, 2013, was actually already the second wave of Taiwanese people looking back at their own old houses. The first wave came earlier.

In 2008, a group in Tainan launched the "Old House, New Life" movement. It was organized by the Old Capital Preservation and Regeneration Cultural Foundation, founded in 1999, and the impetus was very Tainan: in those years, old houses sitting vacant downtown were, for reasons of urban renewal on one hand and sanitary concerns on the other, first in line to be torn down. The people at the foundation didn't see it that way. "Back then, tearing down old houses was partly for urban renewal, and partly out of worry that vacant houses posed sanitary problems," they said in a later interview. "We didn't think demolition should be the only fate for them … so we wanted to do something to get people thinking about what else could be done with old houses."⁷ They held a "beauty pageant" for old houses, flipping "run-down and filthy" into "full of character," and the trend later spread from Tainan across the whole island.

And the word "대만감성"? Every source currently findable points to it first appearing in Korean travel and photography circles around 2019, only truly exploding in the 2020s once K-pop and TV dramas gave it a push⁸. This "2019" itself deserves an honest caveat: the main source for it is Wikipedia — the same kind of source this article opened by showing can get its dates wrong — and every other report that can be found was written retroactively after the trend exploded in 2025, not recorded at the time in 2019. Just like "two thousand types of iron window grilles," a consensus built after the fact can also hide gaps no one has verified. It also has to be admitted here that "eleven years" compares two different kinds of "firsts": 2008 was the founding year of Old House, New Life as an organized movement, while 2019 is merely the year the term "대만감성" happened to surface online — the baselines aren't perfectly matched.

But even taking the most conservative version, the year Tainan residents crouched down to look at their own old houses again (2008) still came eleven years before the year Koreans coined a name for Taiwan's streetscapes (2019); the direction doesn't reverse. Old House Face picked up its cameras (2013), which was also six years ahead of the Koreans. Taiwanese people weren't woken up to look back at their own homes by Korean cameras. We had already looked, ourselves, first.

Source: Old Capital Preservation and Regeneration Cultural Foundation, Wikipedia, Linking Publishing

Strangely enough, this awareness of being "eleven years ahead" was almost never mentioned once the trend caught fire. In June 2025, Taiwan became the Guest of Honor at the Seoul International Book Fair for the first time under the theme "Taiwanese Sensibility." At the pre-fair press conference, Minister of Culture Li Yuan described Taiwan this way⁹:

It's a beautiful passage, but the word "finally" gives it away. "Finally seen by the world" presumes that Taiwan's goodness only counts once the world — this time, Korea — has seen it. That is also the underlying logic of the "cultural export" framing the government has used ever since: turning your own beauty into a transcript written to be read out to an international audience. But what Old House, New Life and Old House Face prove is exactly the opposite.

📝 Curator's Note
The Korean word "감성" means "the capacity to be moved"; its subject is always the person doing the feeling, never the place being photographed. So "대만감성" is really saying "someone was moved by Taiwan" — the emphasis falls on that "someone who feels." Which raises the question: why does that someone have to be Korean? The people who crouched down in Tainan in 2008 to look at old houses were, quite plainly, Taiwanese themselves.

That said, what exactly did Koreans see in Taiwan's streetscapes that made them willing to fly over and photograph them? The answer is far more complicated than "they discovered us," because what they're really looking at is also themselves.

Koreans Are Looking at Their Own Wound Too

Koreans are drawn to Taiwan's streetscapes for a reason they themselves understand very well: they used to have these scenes too, and then tore them all down.

Before the 1990s, the urban backdrops of Taiwan and South Korea were actually similar; after the 1990s, South Korea's streetscapes, chasing modernization, were gradually replaced by tidy high-rises, while Taiwan instead held onto traces of its older way of life¹⁰. And so the everyday scenes Taiwanese people take for granted became, in Korean eyes, "a landscape already lost." What they photograph on Taiwan's streets is, in a sense, their own past that they can't go back to.

2024 was the tipping point. That year, K-pop groups' music videos filmed in Taiwan one after another: NewJeans's "How Sweet" and ILLIT's debut concept photos both turned alleys, apartments, and level crossings that Taiwanese people wouldn't give a second glance into a pilgrimage map¹¹. At the end of the year, HYUKOH lead singer Oh Hyuk came to Taipei to shoot wedding photos; in one sweet shot of the couple crossing the street, the background was the forty-year-old pedestrian overpass at the Heping-Xinsheng intersection. This bridge had once appeared in Edward Yang's Yi Yi and Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman. That same year, it was torn down¹². This bridge will come back later in this article; it is the clearest illustration, in this whole piece, of "the thing being loved is the thing being torn down."

The government quickly seized on the momentum. In 2024, the Tourism Administration brought in Super Junior's Kyuhyun as its ambassador to the Korean market, under the campaign theme "Romance Is Right Beside You"¹³. Notice that word "you": it was in the official wording, only to be frequently dropped later into "Romance Is Close By." A single word's difference, but "you" is exactly the point: romance isn't at some distant scenic spot, it's right beside you, in the place you walk past every day. That endorsement slogan is, in fact, closer to what "감성" actually means than a lot of commentary has managed to be.

To see what Koreans really think, a more honest place to look than official slogans is their own online discussion threads. In 2025, a post on the large Korean forum theqoo drew more than a hundred replies. What's interesting is that the person who posted it was actually a Taiwanese person typing Korean through translation software, curious whether Korean netizens knew the term "대만감성"¹⁴. The replies underneath carried almost none of the condescending exoticism one might expect; instead, they were almost entirely self-reflection along the lines of "we're just the same."

The single most recurring line in the whole thread, translated, was "it's the same in every country" — reply after reply from Korean users recalling the "Korean sensibility" foreigners' cameras keep finding: old red-brick apartment blocks, tangled overhead wires, narrow lanes crowded with signage — things locals are sick of looking at, but that foreigners can't stop photographing. The most thought-provoking comment said the writer's professor lived in Seoul's Seochon (서촌); after the neighborhood became a tourist hotspot for its "atmosphere," the professor simply couldn't understand it, because to him it was just the old neighborhood he lived in every day, and it looked, well, just old¹⁴. Others poured cold water on the whole premise, arguing it was excessive to single out 대만감성 for special comment — any country's foreign-feeling back alleys look, to an outsider's eye, more or less like this same "낯선 느낌" (a sense of unfamiliarity), and Taiwan isn't especially different. That very objection is, itself, the most honest part of the entire discussion.

Even Koreans themselves are, on the matter of "not seeing the everyday life you walk past," exactly like Taiwanese people. They too have old streets rewritten by the tourist gaze: after Seoul's Bukchon Hanok Village went viral, close to sixty percent of Koreans at one point named it the place most urgently needing a fix for "overtourism"; in Ikseon-dong, more than three hundred original residents moved out within three years, as old houses turned into shops one by one¹⁵. None of this has ever been a story unique to Taiwan.

Even that Seoul book fair that gave Taiwan so much face is routinely described as "150,000 visitors to the Taiwan Pavilion, the highest of any year." That number, too, has warped: 150,000 was the total attendance for the entire book fair, not something specific to the Taiwan Pavilion; and the 2024 fair (not a Taiwan theme year) drew roughly the same 150,000 visitors, so it wasn't a record set only in the Taiwan theme year¹⁶. Just like the "two thousand types" at the start of this piece, a good-sounding number doesn't survive being checked.

Koreans are willing to say of their own cities, "we didn't see it either, we're the same." So what about Taiwanese people? Are we, too, still waiting for someone else to like it first before we dare say we're good?

Whether to Define "Taiwanese Flavor" Is the Same Question the Golden Lion Asked

Three years before this wave of Korean-driven fascination went viral, designer Godkidlla (廖小子) was already anxious about the question of "Taiwanese flavor."

In a 2021 dialogue, he said: "A lot of people say my designs have a strong 'Taiwanese flavor,' but I absolutely cannot represent Taiwan." He pushed the question further, more sharply: "Isn't the urge to define Taiwanese flavor in one crude gulp really just because we're afraid that if we can't say what Taiwan is, it's as if Taiwan is nothing?"¹⁷ This line often gets treated as his "clear-eyed response" to the Korean-driven gaze, but the timing doesn't line up: when he said it, NewJeans hadn't yet come to Taiwan to film a music video, and "대만감성" was still just a term within a small Korean circle. What Godkidlla was anxious about was a much older problem in Taiwan's design world: do we really have to define "what Taiwan is" before we dare admit we have anything at all?

Four years later, Godkidlla gave his own answer. At the end of 2025, he became one of the authors of the book Taiwanese Sensibility, contributing a chapter titled "What LED Peacock Lamps Reveal About the Raw Vitality of Taiwanese Aesthetics"¹⁸. He didn't go back to "defining Taiwan." Instead, he picked an LED peacock lamp, the kind seen on electric flower-car stages outside temples, an object about as specific as an object can get, and wrote about it honestly. That answers exactly the question he had asked himself in 2021: rather than defining Taiwanese flavor in one crude gulp, better to point plainly at a single thing and say, "this, this is very Taiwanese."

An electric flower-car at the nighttime temple festival of Beigang Chaotian Temple. The LED peacock lamp Godkidlla chose is exactly this kind of fixture, common on these stages: born and raised on folk-religion ground, never asked in advance whether it counts as aesthetics. Photo: Mk2010 (Malcolm Koo) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

⚠️ Contested View
But does "writing honestly about one object" really resolve the anxiety? A less comfortable question lurks here: when Taiwanese people start re-examining themselves through the lens of "even Koreans think we're beautiful," is that itself a kind of self-orientalism¹⁹, packaging yourself as the exotic spectacle an outsider wants to see, then reclaiming that watched-version of yourself as your own? The reconciliation narrative of "thank you, Koreans, for letting us see ourselves again" sounds warm, but it sidesteps the real question: why does someone else have to see it first? This entire piece does not intend to offer a safe answer to that question.

This question, whether an outsider's stamp of approval is required, is one Taiwan has already lived through once before, in movie theaters.

Taiwan New Cinema is often remembered as a tragic story of "no box office at home, only recognized abroad," but the truth is more complicated. This movement is generally agreed to have begun with In Our Time in 1982²⁰, and within just a few years it hit a major setback: Edward Yang's Taipei Story opened in 1985 and closed after four days²¹; by the end of that year, New Cinema films had suffered one box-office failure after another, and were even attacked by opponents as "box-office poison," dismissed as directors in their thirties who could only "make films about their own navels"²².

The turning point came in 1989, and it turned dramatically. Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness won the Golden Lion at Venice in September, then opened in Taiwan the following month, October, earning roughly NT$66 million at the Taipei box office alone: a huge commercial success for that year²³. This time, international recognition and domestic resonance weren't a "first" and a "later" split apart; they were two things that happened in the same year, in almost the same autumn.

So on the question of whether an outsider has to approve first, Taiwan's film history offers no clean answer. But A City of Sadness at least proved one thing: international recognition and domestic resonance don't necessarily have to trade off against each other. Sometimes they are two things the same film achieves in the same year.

A film can be watched again. A house cannot. When we turn the camera from the movie theater back to the street, a more uncomfortable question appears: for the old things now being torn down, are the reasons we ourselves give for tearing them down honest enough?

Two Reasons for One Bridge, and the Tenants No One Asked

Back to that bridge.

The Heping Xinsheng Pedestrian Bridge was built in 1982. For forty years, it has been one of Taipei's most frequent subjects in front of a camera—aside from Wu Hsieh's wedding photos, both Edward Yang and Ang Lee have filmed here²⁴. In the late hours of November 19, 2024, it was demolished. The reason provided by the city government was "a forty-year service life and structural issues." The problem is that this reason contradicts the city's own reports.

Just six months before the demolition, on May 17, 2024, a company called "Taiwan Integrated Disaster Prevention Engineering Consulting" completed a structural inspection of the bridge; the conclusion was that only the corrosion and perforation of the outer decorative panels needed repair, and the structure itself was sound²⁵. Ms. Gu, who holds a U.S. architect license, later reviewed the records in the "Taipei City Bridge and Culvert Management System" and pointed out this contradiction: despite the inspection clearly stating the "structure is sound," the city's Department of Construction (New Construction Office) changed its stance less than six months later to claim the "bridge structure is concerning"²⁵.

What about that "forty-year service life"? At a coordination meeting between the city government and residents, a Deputy Chief Engineer named Lin from the New Construction Office stated on the spot that the bridge had exceeded its forty-year service life and must be demolished due to structural issues. However, a resident familiar with building regulations questioned him immediately: "The 40-year limit is actually a 'minimum service life for public property (pedestrian bridges)' set by the Ministry of Finance to prevent local governments from building unnecessary infrastructure; it is aimed at preventing corruption, not a functional service life limit."²⁵ (Lin Wen-chun, the organizer of the petition, was also present and recorded this exchange.) A financial regulation designed to prevent local governments from wasting money was being used as the structural basis for tearing down a bridge.

Even more subtle is that the reason for demolition publicly stated by Mayor 蔣萬安 differs from that of the Public Works Department: he argued that the bridge's usage rate was less than 10% and that the piers obstructed drivers' sightlines, even drawing analogies to how traffic accidents decreased after the demolition of the China Mall and the pedestrian bridge at the Xinyi-Keelung Road intersection²⁶. Internally, the city government has never had a unified explanation for "why it must be demolished" that matches the evidence.

✦ Even the reasons for tearing down a single bridge fail to match its own commissioned reports. Could some of that "vanishing Taiwanese sensibility" be things we have torn down without ever being honest about why?

Not every old street meets such an end. Dihua Street in Dadaocheng has taken a different path: through the Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) mechanism, the facades of old houses are preserved, avoiding large-scale demolition. Yet even in this "success story," academia continues to debate whether it has caused displacement or driven up property prices²⁷. Even the method of preservation itself is not a clean answer.

Section 2, Dihua Street, 2024. The facades of old houses have been preserved through the TDR mechanism, making this one of the few historical districts in Taiwan that hasn't been demolished—but even for this "success," academics are still debating its cost. Photo: DONGIE 829 EFUOA / Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

And to be honest, not every demolition has reasons as suspicious as the Heping Xinsheng Pedestrian Bridge. In the same city, the Xining National Housing complex was identified as a haisha wu (sea-sand house) due to excessive chloride content; this is a safety issue with clear technical indicators, not an ambiguous "service life" issue; the reasons for demolishing that old building, where Tsai Ming-liang has filmed several movies, are much more substantial²⁸. On the other hand, in the Lipa Royal Community, which is nearly forty years old and identified as a haisha wu, residents waited a full twenty-five years before finally seeing urban renewal begin; one elderly gentleman described the news as seeing a glimmer of dawn in the dark night²⁹. Both involve demolition, but some demolitions are suspicious, while others are things residents have spent half their lives praying for.

Source: Yahoo News fact-check reports, NOWnews

But whether the demolition is suspicious or necessary, there is one group that has had almost no voice in the entire discussion: tenants. Urban renewal talks about "rights exchange," and the subject is always the property owner with title; those renting inside are legally considered only third parties. Article 58 of the 《Urban Renewal Act》 is very clear: when a tenant is forced to terminate a lease due to urban renewal, the compensation they can claim from the landlord is, in most cases, only "equivalent to two months' rent"³⁰.

In an urban renewal project on Section 2, Chongqing North Road, Taipei, an optical shop was vilified by public opinion as a "holdout" trying to "block renewal to get a bigger slice of the pie" because the tenants hadn't moved out. The owner's explanation was actually quite ordinary: "The internet is just talking nonsense; we aren't that bad. It's because we have a lease dispute with the landlord and are currently in a lawsuit. Once the lawsuit is over, we will move out."³¹ She lacks the agency to fight against a predetermined "holdout" narrative, much like those tenants who have lived in old houses for most of their lives but are never the subject of any urban renewal documents.

Even the reasons for demolition and the people who disappear may be things we fail to speak about honestly. If we cannot clearly explain what we have torn down and why, then the conviction behind the phrase "we saw our old houses were beautiful long ago" lacks a foundation—it seems that the act of "seeing ourselves anew" has not truly been completed.

Wang Tsung-wei's Three Turns, and This Time Let It Be Us Who See First

At the end of 2025, Linking Publishing brought out a book titled, simply, Taiwanese Sensibility. The person behind it was writer Wang Tsung-wei, currently editor-in-chief of UNITAS magazine. He brought together twenty-one authors, each claiming one keyword: signs, markets, the everyday, human warmth, temples, craftsmanship … breaking Taiwan's ordinary daily life into twenty-one facets to write about¹⁸. Two figures who already appeared earlier in this article are among them: Old House Face, who photographed one to two thousand decorative iron window grilles, and Godkidlla, anxious back in 2021 about how "Taiwanese flavor" should be defined.

The most honest thing about this book is that Wang Tsung-wei's own attitude turned three times. At first he resisted the whole idea; it wasn't until the 2025 Seoul Book Fair that he even learned "Taiwanese sensibility" had, in recent years, already become the lens through which Korean travelers viewed, discovered, and performed Taiwan. His first instinct was: what would foreigners know about Taiwanese sensibility? But after he finished reading the manuscripts turned in by the twenty-one invited authors, he conceded:

"When I arrogantly assumed that foreigners couldn't possibly understand what Taiwan's sensibility was, I myself was the Taiwanese person who had my eyes shut and my ears closed, wasting everything beautiful on these ordinary streets."³²

He even wrote, in the book itself, the line "Thank you to the Koreans, for giving me the chance to curate this book"³².

Shophouses from the Qing dynasty through the Japanese colonial period, preserved in Wanhua's Bopiliao Historic Block. The capacity to see these old façades again was never something that needed anyone else's approval first. Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Wang Tsung-wei's humility is moving, but if we let its warmth carry us all the way along, we fall right back into that familiar frame: thank you, Koreans, for finally letting us see ourselves.

But what this entire piece has been trying to say is precisely the opposite. That "person who is moved" could always have had a Taiwanese person as its subject: the people who crouched down to look at old houses in Tainan in 2008 were; the people who drove around photographing decorative iron window grilles window by window in 2013 were; and so are the people brewing tea under their own arcades who never once imagined being liked by anyone. The feeling subject that "대만감성" keeps pointing back to never had to be Korean.

So perhaps the real question isn't "what is Taiwanese sensibility," but this: does this capacity to see ourselves again actually need a Korean like first?

That LED peacock lamp, that cool terrazzo floor, those one to two thousand (remember, "photos," not "types") decorative iron window grille photographs: they're all still there. They were never waiting for anyone to see them first, and someone had already been looking at them properly all along.

But the phrase "still there" has to pass an honest inspection before it can be draped over these objects alone. Chen Yu-hao, currently the only apprentice left at Tseng Wen-chang's shop, keeps going on the strength of one-on-one persuasion: "the boss can always talk me into it, he keeps explaining why it has to be done this way"; no apprenticeship program is there to catch him⁵. Wang Chin-erh's line, "these days there are at most a dozen or so people left in all of Tainan," isn't a nostalgic soundbite to be nodded at and forgotten; it's the reality of a craft on the verge of losing its next generation⁶. An object being seen again doesn't mean the person who makes it has, together with it, also been seen and caught.

This time, let it be us: getting the numbers right, finishing the sentence, and taking in, along with everything else, the people who make these things.

Further Reading:

• Taiwanese Architecture — Behind decorative iron window grilles, arcades, and terrazzo, how Taiwanese architecture grew, layer by layer, into what it is today
• Taiwanese Cinema — The long takes of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang are the earliest visual genes of "Taiwanese sensibility"
• Taiwanese Tea Ceremony and Everyday Aesthetics — Another representative of Taiwan's slow living, reading everyday aesthetics through the tea setting
• Taiwan's Convenience Store Culture — The convenience store still lit up late at night is another facet of Taiwan's everyday aesthetics
• Taiwanese Religion and Temple Culture — Temples are exactly where terrazzo and decorative iron window grilles most often turn up
• Chou Tzu-yu — Another Taiwanese face frequently remembered along the path by which Koreans came to know Taiwan
• Tehching Hsieh — A Taiwanese performance artist who makes time and life itself directly into the artwork, another, more extreme version of Taiwanese sensibility

Image Sources

This article uses 5 public-domain / Creative Commons–licensed images, all cached at public/article-images/culture/ to avoid hot-linking source servers:

• Decorative iron window grilles at the Sanhe Hotel, Changhua City — Photo: Outlookxp, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Terrazzo flooring at Jin'an Temple, Su'ao, Yilan — Photo: Tsai Ming-chih, Lin Li-chen (courtesy of the Yilan County Government Department of Cultural Affairs), CC BY 3.0 TW
• Streetscape of Dihua Street's second section, Datong District, Taipei (March 2024) — Photo: DONGIE 829 EFUOA, CC0
• Wanhua Bopiliao Historic Block — Photo: a Wikimedia Commons contributor, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Nighttime view of the electric flower-car at Beigang Chaotian Temple — Photo: Mk2010 (Malcolm Koo), CC BY-SA 3.0

References