Museum of Contemporary Art

Today I went to Taipei's Museum of Contemporary Art, also known as A Collection of Very Complicated-Looking Chinese Characters That Were Very Difficult to Look Up In My Dictionary.

The MOCA Taipei building is a gorgeous, antique-looking red mansion. Very long and two stories high with a grandiose marble entrance, it stands out among the tiny, battered clothing and shoe shops that line Chang An Road. Attached to the museum sits an eccentric, dimly-lit cafe called where people can sit down for lunch or a coffee without having to pay an admission fee.

The admission fee was very cheap, only NT $50, which is slightly less than US $2.00. In New York and San Francisco (and Tampa, too), I'm used to paying at least $10.00 for admission. Unless I'm going to the Met in New York, and I don't pay over a dollar because it's "a suggested donation." (Sorry, Met. I promise I'll give it all back when I live in a huge six-bedroom apartment overlooking Central Park and have all the money in the world to spend on museums, Chanel bags and six-bedroom apartments. Promise.)

But I soon realized why the admission fee is so cheap. Because even though the museum LOOKS big, it's actually quite small! I finished walking every inch of it in under an hour. The exhibits were few but they were GIGANTIC. Here were some of the highlights:

1) An indoor forest. Not lying. There were two doors: one was the entrance, and one was the exit. Once you stepped through the entrance, your feet hit mulch. your eyes caught a small pond and and you could smell the intoxicating scent of fir trees, which lined the walls and lived in lines of rows so that they seemed to go on forever. In the center of the room was a gauzy white tent. Inside was a DIY table where you could use a giant stamp to paint a character on a piece of paper that you could take home with you. (Free souvenir!) Mine turned out pretty lame because I didn't press the stamp hard enough into the paint dish. My piece of paper has a faded outline of some indistinguishable character. (Some souvenir.) By the exit was a small bench upon which you could sit and breathe in the forest and listen to the babble of the pond's tiny fountain for a few more moments before moving on to the next exhibit.

2) An enormous pool of ink. Not lying again. One of the most impressive exhibits was a huge pool of black ink that lay inside a dark room, lit only by the glow of a massive tin sculpture that served as an island in the ink pool. Paper lined one edge of the pool; it was translucent enough so that the characters beneath it were visible. "Mao bi," or brushes made for calligraphy writing, lay atop the paper. You could sit down, dip a "mao bi" into the vast ink pool before you, and trace a character with it. Pretty cool, right? I was amazed when I brushed my "mao bi" against the calligraphy paper and I saw a lovely character realized before me. I did suffer one embarrassment, though, in the ink pool room. When I re-dipped the brush into the ink, I didn't press the brush against the edge of the pool, which flattens the brush and makes it easier to write. When I touched the brush to the paper, a blob of ink appeared instead of a delicate stroke. Then, without thinking, I shook the brush AS IF IT WERE A PEN. I looked so ridiculous that a museum volunteer hurried toward me, yanked the brush from my hand and showed me how to press it against the side of the pool. DUH. IT'S NOT A PEN. YOU CAN'T SHAKE IT LIKE A PEN. (I'm a dumb American.)

See pictures below.

Exterior:



Indoor forest:



Giant ink pool:








Other exhibits: