Day #130: Pier-2 Art District

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Another travelling day today, from Kaohsiung to Chiayi. Before leaving there was time to go back to the Pier-2 Art District. The area consists of 15 or so warehouses that have been converted into galleries, as well as a lot of outdoor installations along the Love River cycle path, which I had already seen from a bicycle. One of the largest outdoor artworks is made of recycled shipping containers - an example from the annual Container Art Festival hosted in Kaohsiung, where art incorporating shipping containers is displayed.

The art on display is generally edgy: the most "traditional" exhibition I saw was of a series of photographs of the Taiwanese travelling community, who travel with lorries that open up into garish stages (similar both technically and in style to fairground lorries) on which they perform (usually singing and dancing) to earn money. I saw two more exhibitions, both more left field: one that had involved growing a small field of corn outside one of the warehouses (and filming it), and one where the artist had made large sculptures of melting ice creams with hundreds of tiny toy soldiers pouring out of them. In this warehouse one of the attendants spent a good 10 minutes enthusiastically explaining the various metaphorical elements of this artwork to me, which I was impressed by - you don't often get that in London galleries.

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