Republic of China Aesthetics: From County and City Flags to Street Signs, How an Island Turns Life into a Visual Puzzle

On October 15, 2024, the Ministry of Economic Affairs announced the results of the signage renovation in the Guohua-Youai Commercial District of Tainan, replacing a total of 41 shop signs. ¹ In 2016, the approach ramp of the Zhongxiao Bridge in Taipei was demolished, allowing the North Gate to finally re-emerge from beneath the overpass; the surrounding area subsequently began reorganizing the streets and signage. ² On February 29, 2024, the New Taipei Municipal Government approved the second comprehensive review of the detailed plan for the Taipei University Community Specific District. ³

These three dates, seemingly belonging to commercial district design, historical landscapes, and urban planning, all answer the same question: How can a city make its residents understand themselves?

30-Second Overview: "Republic of China aesthetics" is not an official aesthetic classification used by the government, but rather a satirical label that has gradually circulated in online and visual discussions. It typically points to a state where high-saturation signs, stretched canvas fonts, protruding balconies, iron windows, rooftop additions, dense power lines, county and city flags, public facilities, and public sector promotional images are mixed within a single field of vision. This term captures tangible visual phenomena, yet it also compresses post-war housing needs, commercial competition, local autonomy, maintenance costs, bidding systems, and historical memory into a single mockery. What is truly worth examining is not whether Taiwan is ugly, but who decided what streets should look like and when.

Don't Rush to Take "Ugly" as the Answer

In recent years, several videos discussing Taiwan's streetscapes have pointed to the same urban surface from different directions. Some discuss visual fatigue through sign colors and fonts; others view tin sheds, protruding balconies, air conditioner outdoor units, and power lines as a stacking of post-war life; still others place public sector promotional videos and county/city visual identities into the same checklist. Another video returns to commercial posters from the Japanese colonial era, reminding us that Taiwan's visual culture did not begin with the word "ugly." ^{4 5 6 7 8 9}

The commonality among these videos is treating the streetscape as social history. Their limitations are equally obvious. Statements in the videos such as "red and yellow color schemes are tiring," "Taiwanese people only care about cost-performance," or "Republic of China aesthetics is an aesthetics of addition" are critiques, not facts that can directly replace research. They serve well as entry points, but the real article must ask further: What regulations govern signs? Who produces public visuals? Can local governments set their own colors and fonts? Why do some redevelopment areas look distinctly like another kind of Taiwan?

📝 Curator's Note: Calling a place "ugly" quickly gains resonance. Only by breaking it down into systems, objects, and human choices does true understanding begin.

What This Term Actually Says

"Republic of China aesthetics" is not a national style with a clear design manual. It is more like a retrospective framework of viewing, piecing together visual choices from different eras, different agencies, and different industries into a synthetic image with satirical undertones.

This synthetic image includes the red tiles, green columns, and symmetrical compositions of national memorial architecture, as well as canvas signs on market walls, scrolling LED displays of cram schools, bright red gold characters of temples, mascots of local events, and emblems and flags of county and city governments. It simultaneously contains "the order the state wants people to see" and "the things residents add themselves for daily life."

Therefore, this term has at least eight dimensions. It is a dimension of architecture, and also a dimension of signage. It is a dimension of public facilities and county/city flags, and also a dimension of illegal structures, power lines, parking, and maintenance. It also encompasses public sector bidding and promotion, whether schools teach people how to look, and how a society decides which local styles are worth preserving.

Architecture Is Not Background, but a Gesture Left by Life

On Taiwanese streets, building facades rarely belong solely to architects. Homeowners install iron windows for safety. Residents protrude balconies to gain more indoor space. Rooftop additions are for storage, living, or doing business. Air conditioners hang on exterior walls because every room must face heat and humidity. These actions may not conform to the ideals of urban design, but they are not meaningless clutter.

Streetscape criticism often treats them as evidence of "destroying aesthetics," yet rarely asks who would bear the safety, space, and living costs if they were removed. This does not mean all protrusions, additions, or public space occupations are reasonable. It only means aesthetic judgment cannot skip over living conditions. When building codes and family needs are long out of sync, the city grows its negotiation results directly onto the exterior walls.

"Republic of China aesthetics" here is not an actively chosen style, but a surface left by many small compromises. It looks chaotic because every family once added its own sentence to a building.

📝 Curator's Note: The iron windows on a wall are not just saying "this is not beautiful." They are also saying "the people here once needed a safer, larger room."

Signage Is Commercial Competition, and Also Local Language

In Taiwan's mixed residential-commercial districts, signs can hardly retreat into the background. Residences, breakfast shops, clinics, cram schools, motorcycle dealerships, and hardware stores may share the same row of covered walkways (qilou). Every shop must let passersby know what it sells, so signs become brighter, larger, and pack more information. English streetscape cases also point out that many urban districts in Taiwan mix residential and commercial uses, with shops using bright or even flashing signs to attract customers, which easily makes the streetscape appear disordered and increases visual fatigue. ¹⁰

The current Regulations on the Management of Signs, Advertisements, and Erected Advertisements is actually not entirely laissez-faire. The Ministry of the Interior defines signs and erected advertisements, stipulates that some sizes are exempt from miscellaneous permits, and sets protrusion distances, net height, application review, and permit periods. More importantly, Article 8 explicitly states that local governments may formulate setting specifications regarding the shape, color, and font type of signs based on local characteristics. ¹¹

This reveals a frequently ignored distinction. Whether regulations have tools, and whether a common visual language forms on the street, are two different things. The former concerns permits, dimensions, and safety. The latter must address whether shop owners are willing to change together, whether landlords agree, who pays for design fees, and whether residents feel the new signs still look like their neighborhood.

The Taipei North Gate street sign project offers a direction. The design team first established a sign database, then invited residents, shop owners, designers, and fabricators to discuss scale, position, lighting, color, font, and materials, finally having six designers collaborate with six shops for renovation. The key to this case is not turning all storefronts into the same minimalist style, but letting rules grow out of community discussion. ¹⁰

📝 Curator's Note: Good signage does not mute the street; it lets every voice have its own volume.

Color, Font, and "Aesthetics of Addition"

Videos often summarize Taiwan's streetscape problems as red-and-yellow pairings, high saturation, too many characters, and fonts being stretched or flattened. These descriptions capture part of the visual experience, but "many colors" does not equal "no design." Temples,布袋戏 (布袋戏) trunks, night market lights, and traditional markets may inherently use strong colors. The problem usually lies in the lack of a common scale among different objects; everything wants to be the first focal point from a distance.

A sign can simultaneously have a shop name, phone number, business items, discounts, franchise information, a mascot, and an address. When every element is seen as indispensable information, design becomes mere stacking. This is what people call "aesthetics of addition." It does not necessarily stem from ignorance, but may also be shop owners fearing customers won't understand, or supervisors fearing the image won't look lively enough.

However, Taiwan's problem is not just "too much." Japanese-era commercial posters and liquor advertisements also once used vivid images, figures, text, and exotic imagination. This batch of historical materials reminds us that commercial visuals have always absorbed contemporary technology, industry, and trends. What truly needs inquiry is whether today's design knows what it is quoting, and whether it can let new elements and old neighborhoods explain each other. ⁶

County and City Flags: The Most Easily Ignored Public Visual

If signs represent private commerce, county and city flags are the method by which local governments place themselves into the streetscape. They often appear at city halls, district offices, schools, sports fields, festival stages, and road entrances. The emblems, text, English names, colors, and proportions on flags, combined with architecture, event backdrops, uniforms, and promotional vehicles, form local identity.

This layer is often ignored because people are accustomed to treating flags as background. In fact, flags are very honest. They cannot explain slowly like a website, nor can they supplement stories like long texts. They must make people recognize where they are in the wind, from a distance, in folds, and in rapidly passing glances.

Public domain files that can be directly embedded are available for the Taoyuan City Flag and the Yilan County Flag on Wikimedia Commons. The value of these images lies not in proving which flag looks better, but in letting readers see that local identity is also part of urban design. ^{12 13}

Image: Taoyuan City Flag, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain/PD-ROC-exempt. File page: Flag of Taoyuan City.svg. Here only the hot URL is embedded; the image is not downloaded.

The dilemma of county and city flags is similar to that of signs. Too much text makes it look like a blur from a distance. Emblems stuffed with too many mountains, seas, rice ears, roads, technology, and historical symbols cause local stories to lose layering. When colors have no usage regulations, city flags, event flags, mascots, and promotional backdrops speak independently; hanging them in a row creates a visual sense of "everyone represents the local area, but no one designed together."

This is the public version of "Republic of China aesthetics." It is not the responsibility of a single flag, but the result of local governments placing identity, political slogans, tourism imagery, and administrative functions all on the same image. Flags can be lively, but liveliness does not equal recognizability. Local culture does not need to be compressed into a mountain shape, a flower, or five colors to be considered represented.

Image: Yilan County Flag, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain/PD-ROC-exempt. File page: Flag of Yilan County.svg. Here only the hot URL is embedded; the image is not downloaded.

📝 Curator's Note: A flag is not the whole of a place, but it exposes whether the local government knows what should be kept and what can be let go.

Power Lines, Air Conditioners, and Parking: Infrastructure Also Has Aesthetics

The things most easily joked about in streetscapes are often not the buildings themselves, but where buildings meet infrastructure. Power lines span the sky, air conditioner outdoor units hang one by one on exterior walls, transformer boxes stand at the edge of covered walkways, and motorcycles cut sidewalks into narrow channels. These things are rarely the protagonists designers imagined at the start, yet they daily affect how people walk, park, and enter shops.

Viewing them all as "messy" ignores the division of labor in urban systems. Power lines may involve telecommunications and power supply. Air conditioners involve indoor thermal comfort. Parking involves residential density and traffic policy. Covered walkways are the intersection of private property rights, public passage, and commercial display. When different systems are not coordinated on the same map, the result is that residents fill in the gaps themselves.

This is why "Taiwan should be as tidy as Japan" is not a complete answer. Japanese cities also have signs, power lines, old houses, and private needs; they are just managed by different regions using rules and maintenance methods of different intensities. What Taiwan truly needs to learn may not be the surface style of a certain country, but how to design public systems, private use, and local life together.

Public Sector Visuals: When Promotional Videos Become Part of the Streetscape

Republic of China aesthetics has another dimension often placed outside the streetscape: visuals produced by the public sector itself, including posters, promotional videos, mascots, event main visuals, and social media graphics. They may not hang on building exteriors, but they appear at bus stops, TV walls, intersection billboards, school bulletin boards, and mobile phone screens. When a government is accustomed to using abundant colors, large-character slogans, and figures' actions to express "liveliness," it brings the aesthetics of addition into public communication.

User-provided reference videos discuss labor ministry, Taichung City Transportation Bureau, and Kaohsiung tourism promotional videos together, with interviewed designers criticizing low-price bidding, internal concurrent positions, and supervisor opinions potentially overriding professional judgment. These are the views of the videos and interviewees, and should not be directly taken as statistical conclusions for all public sector projects. A more stable statement is that public sector visuals often simultaneously bear pressure from political visibility, administrative schedules, procurement budgets, and professional quality. ⁸

Conversely, the campus design project cooperated between the Ministry of Education and the Taiwan Design Research Institute has addressed learning environment issues for schools since 2019. English official data indicates that, as of the page's publication, aesthetic renovations for 91 schools have been completed, with cases winning international design awards. ¹⁴ This shows that the public sector does not only produce visuals that are mocked. Institutions can become entry points for design accumulation, provided design is treated as a problem to be studied, rather than a decoration pasted on at the end.

📝 Curator's Note: What "public sector aesthetics" needs to change most may not be color schemes, but bringing designers into the process earlier.

From North Gate to Beida Special District: Exceptions Are Not Counter-Evidence, But Clues

If Taiwan's streetscapes had no rules at all, there would be no North Gate, nor would there be a Beida Special District. The Taipei North Gate case shows that when overpasses are demolished and historical landscapes re-emerge, street signs and public spaces can be redesigned through community discussion. The Beida Special District is another kind of exception. It is not old street renewal, but a specific district plan that comes first, allowing roads, building setbacks, green spaces, and the imagination of a university town to land together.

Documents announced by the New Taipei Municipal Government in 2024 confirm that the second comprehensive review of the detailed plan for the Taipei University Community Specific District took effect on February 29, 2024. ³ Existing Taiwan.md articles detail the urban planning, Xueqin Road spatial scale, residential development, population growth, and social identity issues of the Beida Special District. ¹⁵

Thus, the Beida Special District cannot be used to prove "tidiness is all that matters," nor can it be romanticized as an aesthetic paradise without problems. It is more like an institutional control group. When scope, setbacks, roads, green spaces, and building rules are placed into the same plan before development, streetscapes may indeed present different results. But even in the Beida Special District, building height, parking, maintenance, population density, and local identity will continue to generate friction.

The most important aspect of this exception is that it lets us see that streetscapes are not just mirrors of national character. Streetscapes are also the result of plans, regulations, land rights, construction quality, and subsequent maintenance.

Tainan Yongle Market: Tidy Does Not Necessarily Mean Losing Local Flavor

Another example worth examining is the signage renovation in the Guohua-Youai Commercial District, promoted by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Taiwan Design Research Institute. Official data mentions that this renovation resulted in 41 signs, integrating commercial district culture, shop stories, and design introduction. Shop owners were not only required to replace signs with the same template; instead, the district was changed through redesign, storefront organization, and local cultural narratives. ¹

The significance of this matter lies not in Tainan becoming "not messy" from now on. Districts naturally grow; shop owners change hands; awnings age; festivals re-hang flags. The true progress is that the local area begins to possess a discussable language: Should signs be set back? Does color need white space? Which old fonts are worth preserving? Can public facilities work together with shop owners' lives?

Therefore, streetscape renovation does not have to choose between "total uniformity" and "complete laissez-faire." Community participation at North Gate, commercial district renovation in Tainan, and urban planning in the Beida Special District are all attempting a third path: letting rules be clear, while letting places still have the right to speak.

Aesthetic Education Is Not Teaching People to Despise Others' Homes

If Republic of China aesthetics is only taught as "frowning at tin sheds," education will only create new class tastes. True aesthetic education should enable people to distinguish color, proportion, material, font, flow, sound, and maintenance, and also to understand why an object is there and who needs it.

The Ministry of Education's Third Phase Medium- and Long-Term Plan for Aesthetic Education lists aesthetic support, aesthetic diffusion, aesthetic sustainability, and local aesthetics as goals, and lists talent cultivation, curriculum practice, learning environments, international linkage, and support systems as promotion dimensions. The plan also connects aesthetics with living environments, cultural heritage, local identity, and community learning. ¹⁶

This direction is important because streetscape problems cannot be solved by designers alone. Shop owners must learn to negotiate with neighbors. Civil servants must know how to write requirements that do not stifle design. Students must learn to see public spaces. Residents must be able to articulate the sense of place they want to preserve, rather than only accepting "experts say this is more beautiful."

📝 Curator's Note: Aesthetic education is not training everyone into the same taste, but enabling more people to participate in "where we want to live together."

The Questions Left by Those Videos

Although the six reference videos differ in tone, materials, and stance, they jointly leave three questions. First, is the chaos of Taiwan's streetscapes an aesthetic problem, or a problem where living, commerce, and governance were not handled simultaneously? Second, is local identity about stuffing all symbols into emblems and flags, or can it choose a clear, extendable language willing to be used by residents? Third, when the government says it wants to improve city appearance, whose city appearance is being improved?

These three questions also create fissures in the term "Republic of China aesthetics." It can describe a real visual fatigue, but cannot blame all residents, shop owners, designers, and civil servants for not caring about beauty. It can point out the common sense of red-yellow pairings, dense text, and object stacking, but cannot thereby erase the respective living histories of markets, temples, old signs, county/city flags, and immigrant families.

What is most worth leaving is actually the opposite of this term. When a place begins to be willing to discuss flag proportions, sign lighting, covered walkway walking, school entrances, street maintenance, and the visibility of historical architecture, Taiwan is no longer just a viewed streetscape, but a city that can be co-edited.

Conclusion: Do Not Erase Taiwan's Chaos, First Let It Be Understood

Taiwan does not need to turn every street into Kyoto, nor does it need to change all signs to the same low-saturation font. That would erase the differences in local life and mistake "tidiness" for the only beauty.

What is more worth pursuing is letting things of different scales know each other's existence. Let county and city flags have clear identity; let public sector visuals have sustainable systems; let signs find negotiation between commercial needs and street scale; let iron windows, air conditioners, and power lines no longer rely solely on residents filling in gaps themselves; let exceptions like the Beida Special District be studied, not just shown off.

The most useful moment for "Republic of China aesthetics" is not when it is used to mock an old apartment building or a county/city flag, but when it forces us to see: A city's appearance is never naturally grown, nor is it innate to a certain people. It is a synthetic image left by every construction, addition, flag-hanging, sign, bidding, maintenance, education, and vote.

📝 Curator's Note: A city's true beauty is not wiping clean the traces of life, but letting those traces not step on each other, yet still appear together in the frame.

Further Reading

• Beida Special District: Thirty Years of Urban Planning and University Town Life Experiments — Existing Taiwan.md entry, deeply handling the Beida Special District's urban planning, spatial aesthetics, population, and local identity.
• Starting from Street Signs — Using the Taipei North Gate street sign project as an example, explaining community participation, sign regulations, and public space design.
• Ministry of Education Medium- and Long-Term Plan for Aesthetic Education, Third Phase Five-Year Plan — Understanding living aesthetics and local practice from educational policy.

References

Image: Chinese Signs on a Taipei Street Corner, Wikimedia Commons, CC0/Public domain. File page: Taipei street signs.jpg. Here only the hot URL is embedded; the image is not downloaded.