展期 Duration｜2026.03.11 (Wed.) - 2026.04.12 (Sun.)
開幕茶會 Opening｜2026.03.14 (Sat.) 14:00
ABOUT
About NEXT ART TAINAN
To support the creative development of young artists, invigorate the art market, and establish a platform for collaboration between artists and enterprises, the Cultural Affairs Bureau of the Tainan City Government has organized the「Tainan New Arts Award」 since 2013. The award aims to encourage and recognize outstanding young artists in Taiwan while promoting the advancement of contemporary art.
About Tainan New Arts Award
「Tainan New Arts Award 」centers on discovering “the next rising art star” as its core mission. In collaboration with art fairs, local galleries, and exhibition spaces in Tainan, as well as other private-sector partners, the award adopts a professional curatorial system to foster intersections between contemporary art, cultural venues, and the city—creating more opportunities for dialogue and meaningful connections.
2026 Tainan New Arts Award Exhibition introduction
Text By Nobuo Takamor
【 Windy Hills: Brewers of Civilization 】
“Tò-hong” (literally “against the winds”) refers to the strong winds that blow from the mountains toward the coast during the annual northeast monsoon season. In the seventeenth century, the area around present-day Madou was known as the Tò-hong Inner Sea, where ships crossing the lagoon had to sail into strong headwinds to reach inland ports. Although this natural landscape, like the Taijiang Inner Sea, has long since disappeared over the course of history, the term “Tò-hong” appears to have persisted in the collective memory of earlier Settlers. Through the transmission of language, it has entered the vocabulary used to describe Tainan’s terroir and local landscape.
As for “Lāi-suann” (literally “interior mountains”), it was a term used during the Qing dynasty-ruling era to refer to the hilly region of Tainan stretching from Baihe and Dongshan in the north to Nanhua and Longqi in the south. While these hills are far less imposing than Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range, their fragmented terrain and distinctive geology unexpectedly provided refuge to successive waves of civilizations on the island. From the Zuojhen Man culture of the Stone Age to the present-day Siraya culture, Tainan’s “Lāi-suann” region functioned as one of the island’s earliest points of contact with the outside world and as a crossroads of multiple cultures, its unique natural environment. One can even argue that “Lāi-suann” became a place where cultures and civilizations were able to “ferment”—taking form and evolving slowly over time. Conceptually, Taiwan’s “Lāi-suann” differs from the Japanese notion of “Urayama.” In Japan, Urayama typically refers to the hills behind a village—the space inhabited by spirits yet regarded as accessible and even protective of human communities. In Taiwan, by contrast, these interior mountains were long perceived by settlers as a taboo or forbidden zone, while simultaneously serving as a special landscape where cultural exchange and continuity could nonetheless take place.
The “Lāi-suann” area is neither towering peaks nor easily accessible terrain. When early settlers established themselves on the Tainan plains and sought agricultural land, they expanded northward toward Yunlin and Chiayi, and southward toward Kaohsiung and Pingtung plains. In the course of this development, Tainan’s “Lāi-suann” unexpectedly emerged as a transitional zone between different civilizations. Here, the influence of Han Chinese culture—from tools to languages—symbolized the reshaping of the island’s cultural landscape by external forces. Yet the “Lāi-suann” communities retained a form of liminal autonomy, continuing to safeguard traditional knowledge and belief systems amid ongoing historical change. Much like the setting of The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) by Thomas Mann, Tainan’s “Lāi-suann” area functions as a kind of time capsule along the axis of history: a place where time appears suspended, and where civilization can still evolve and take shape. The “Lāi-suann” area is thus not
only a refuge for different civilizations in Taiwan, but also a landscape where traces of magic and ancestral spirits continue to linger.
As The Magic Mountain suggests, everything that happens down below exists on the mountain only as memory. While the plains of Tainan became the historical front line of Taiwan’s engagement with the outside world, the “Lāi-suann” area was a place where time seemed to slow, preserving memory within a complex yet gentle geographical environment. Although Taiwan is often described as an island of a hundred peaks, the imagery and culture of these interior mountains in Tainan remain hidden—almost recessive. Overlooked in the history of colonial expansion, the “Lāi-suann” region nonetheless served as points of intersection where different civilizations encountered one another across time. Here, reality and imagination, history and the present, overlap and intermingle, forming a kind of magical realism unique to Tainan and a distinctive imprint of Taiwan’s own civilizations
Building on the theme of the 2025 Next Art Tainan Award, “Hidden Sea, Growing City,” which examined Tainan’s water cultures, the 2026 edition proposes a shift in perspective: turning away from the sea and toward the mountains. By embracing the concept of “Tò-hong”— going against the winds and moving toward the inner land— this exhibition, through the language of contemporary art, explores Tainan’s inner mountain cultures, situating them within both contemporary society and an international context.
Following established practice, the 2026 Next Art Tainan Award includes both an open call and an international invitation program. More than 400 artists applied, from whom ten awardees were selected; three of them will also participate in the Art Tainan. The selection process continues the previous edition’s emphasis on diverse perspectives, seeking to identify emerging artists who balance market potential with distinctive artistic positions and pluralistic viewpoints. In addition, several renowned Taiwanese and international artists have been invited to engage with and celebrate Tainan’s “magic mountains.”
This year’s award-winning artists work across a wide range of media, from experimental painting and installation to interdisciplinary practices, offering a clear snapshot of Taiwan’s emerging contemporary art scene. Many engage with the relationship between humans and nature, and with the shifting boundaries between civilization and society. Others explore material ambiguity as a means of opening new frontiers for artistic expression. In dialogue with the curatorial theme, several artists will also develop participatory workshops based on their creative concepts. The curatorial team also plans to invite both Taiwanese artists who have long engaged with related topics and international artists working with comparable contexts, weaving together multiple dimensions of intersecting civilizations within this year’s Next Art Tainan Award.
Among the awardees, Tsai Yu-Ting’s “Seeking for Absent Forms in Forests” resonates directly with the curatorial theme. Presented as video art, Tsai brings viewers back to Taiwan’s mountain forests during the Japanese colonial period through a surreal lens, creating a distinctive spatiotemporal atmosphere. Exhibited at Aglow Art Space, Tsai’s work will be shown alongside video pieces by invited artist Lin Yen-Xiang , whose long-term research focuses on belief systems in Taiwan’s mountain forests during the same historical period. This pairing forms a layered and meaningful dialogue.
Also exhibiting at Aglow Art Space is invited artist Chen Guan-Jhang , who has long engaged with Siraya culture and its religious belief systems. Through video art, Chen presents his observations and research that further expands the exhibition’s exploration of Tainan’s “Lāi-suann” landscape.
At Asir Art Museum, award-winning artist Tseng Chih-Yu reinterprets her observations of plants and flowers through an everyday, attentive sensibility. Adopting a tone reminiscent of a nature journal, she renders botanical subjects poetically through silkscreen printing and gouache painting. Given the art museum’s proximity to Tainan Park, invited artist Chang Wen-Woan complements the exhibition with sculptural installations composed of animals and found objects. Through absurd yet playful narratives, Chang offers a sharp analysis of the relationship between nature and society.
Several artists this year also experimented with painting and mixed-media practices. At San Gallery, award-winning artist Hsiao Yu-Chieh works with acrylic panels to create minimalist mixed-media works. The colors and materials used create a distinctive tension that is expected to resonate strongly with Tainan’s historic architectural spaces. At Soka Art, Lin I-Tsen employs carbon powder and gradations of grey-to-white paper pulp to create works that, at first glance, resemble paintings, but are in fact formed through hand-pressing techniques, occupying an intermediary space between painting and sculpture.
At Inart Space, award-winning artist Hong Yi-Ting explores the possibilities of experimental painting. Through the accumulations of dust/printmaking residue and expansive monochrome surfaces, her works open up multiple spatial dimensions. Her parallel practice as a poet lends the works a distinctive lyrical intensity. Her exhibition sets the stage for visitors to continue upstairs, where they encounter invited Indian artist Sharbendu De. Living near the India’s mountain borderland, he has developed a perspective distinct from India’s mainstream, cultivating a deep engagement with the mountain communities. His surreal photographic series captures these communities’ ongoing search for some sort of balance between tradition and modern life.
At Absolute Space for the Arts, award-winning artist Liu Shu-Yu focuses on semantic shifts and reinterpretation through playful art installations, responding directly to the works by invited Malaysian artist Tan Zi Hao. Tan’s practice takes Malaysia’s multilingual sign landscape as a central medium. In this exhibition, Tan not only presents works grounded in Malaysian culture, but also develops new pieces in response to Tainan’s local cultural context. The award-winning artist Chen Hsing Yu , exhibiting at Der-Horng Art Gallery, engages in a dialogue between space and material through the weathered marks on the gallery walls themselves.
Another Malaysian award-winning artist, Yong Kian Sam, presents architecture-related works at Mizuiro Workshop. Drawing inspiration from vernacular Malaysian architecture, his installations construct immersive spatial environments and unique soundscapes. Invited artist Yang Shun-Fa challenges conventional notions of “mountains” through a rice-planting project titled “Golden Mother-and-Son Mountains,” presented in the form of documentary records. Meanwhile, invited artist Chin Cheng-Te, known for his long-term field research in Taiwan’s natural environments and for installations that integrate closely with mountain and forest landscapes, develops new site-specific works rooted in Tainan’s historical and cultural context.
The exhibition also invites Tongan artist John Vea, whose installation at Zit-Dim Art Space addresses the topic of migrant workers. Through a poetic approach, John Vea address an issue central to his artistic practice and personal experience as a Pacific Islander, reflecting on the forced mobility of his compatriots as seasonal workers across New Zealand and Australia. At Daxin Art Museum, artist Lee Chen-An draws on his architectural background to explore interactions between nature, machines, and humans through her art installation. As for the invited artist from France, Sandrine Deumier, she reinterprets her observations and imaginings of Siraya culture and history through interactive animation artworks.
At Mezzo Art, award-winning artist Hou Ssu-Chi uses digital media and the motif of ornamental lattice windows to explore the dialectic of “inside/outside” in Tainan’s urban spaces. This sensorial approach to visual observation is intriguingly juxtaposed with the playful works of invited artist Wu Pu-Wei.
The 2026 Next Art Tainan creates a platform for dialogue not only between emerging Taiwanese artists and promising international practitioners, but also among curators. This year’s intergenerational curatorial team brings together curator Nobuo Takamori with Tainan-based emerging curators Shih Yu-Chieh and Chen Ying-Ting as assistant curators. Approaching the curatorial theme from multiple perspectives, this collaboration continues the award’s commitment to intergenerational dialogue and the discovery of emerging voices. Ultimately, inspired by the spirit of “Tò-hong,” this year’s Next Art Tainan seeks to generate fresh ways of seeing and open spaces for dialogue, cultivating a new form of civilization that speaks to our time and to our island nation.
INFO
藝術家 Artist｜陳星宇 Hsing-Yu Chen
策展人 Curator｜高森信男 Nobuo TAKAMORI
展期 Duration｜2026.03.12 (Thu.) - 2026.04.12 (Sun.)
開幕茶會 Opening｜2026.03.14 (Sat.) 14:00
展覽開放時間 Exhibition Open Hours｜(Tue.)～(Sat.) 11:00am-19:00pm
聯絡 Contact｜info@derhorng.com｜06-2271125
地點 Venue｜德鴻畫廊（台南市中西區中山路1號）
Der-Horng Art Gallery（No.1, Chung-Shan Rd., West Central Dist., 700007, Tainan, Taiwan）