MoCA Taipei

The building that houses MoCA Taipei is itself a city-designated historic site. Completed in 1921, it was originally Jiancheng Elementary School, which during the Japanese colonial period educated Japanese children and a small number of elite Taiwanese pupils. The building has a red-brick surface, tall vertical windows, wooden roof trusses and a pitched Western-style roof of black tiles. After 1945 it became the offices of the Taipei City Government, and for decades it was the centre that drove the city's development. In 1994 the city government moved to its new civic centre in Xinyi District. In 1996 the old city hall was listed as a city historic site, and a plan to reuse it began. The museum was first called the Taipei Second Fine Arts Museum. It was later separated from Taipei Fine Arts Museum, renamed in 2000, and opened as MoCA Taipei on 26 May 2001. For its first seven years it was publicly owned and privately run, with the Contemporary Art Foundation promoting dialogue between Taiwan and the international art world. From 2008 the Taipei Culture Foundation took over, continuing to combine public and private resources to promote cross-disciplinary creativity. The museum's core aims are to support diverse artistic creation, encourage new perspectives and ways of thinking, and bring creative energy to the city. It shows avant-garde contemporary art, offers audio guides and group tours, and holds talks, lecture series and workshops to bring art closer to daily life.

Translated and shortened by DealTaipei from Taiwan's national tourism database. Sources are on the terms page.