2026 NEXT ART TAINAN ⇀ Windy Hills：Brewers of Civilization｜Liu Shu-Yu X Tan Zi-Hao

Duration｜2026.03.12 (thu) - 04.12 (sun)

Artist｜Liu Shu-Yu X Tan Zi-Hao

Venue｜Absolute Space for the Arts

Opening｜2026.03.14 (sat) 15:00

Forum｜2026.03.14 (sat) 15:30

Guest｜Zheng Sheng-Hua

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Curator / Nobuo TAKAMORI

“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.

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.

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Exhibited Artist  ₒ॰°৹º

(Winner of NEXT ART TAINAN)

Shu-Yu LIU

Shu-Yu LIU (b.1995) was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and lives and works in Bali, New Taipei. She graduated from Taipei National University of the Arts with an MFA in Printmaking in 2023.

Her practice focuses on the perceptual relationships between people, architecture, and space, exploring how the body, through everyday gestures, recognizes and reconstructs the structures and orders of space. Traversing the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional forms, her works integrate printmaking, images, sculpture, and installation. By deconstructing and reorganizing the elements of things, she creates new connections and orders, establishing alternative ways of seeing and spatial languages. She regards the interaction between body and material as a form of “three-dimensional chartography,” through which she traces and reveals the relationship between herself and the external world.

Her works have been exhibited at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2025), Taoyuan Arts Center (2022), New Taipei Gallery (2022), and Hong Foundation (2019); and she held a solo exhibition at King Car Cultural & Art Center (2023). Liu has received the Next Art Tainan (2026), the Third Prize in Printmaking at the Taoyuan Fine Arts Exhibition (2020), and the Long Yen Art Award (2019). Her works are included in the collections of Art Bank Taiwan, the Long Yen Foundation, and private collectors.

Website｜https://shuyuliu.com/

Instagram｜@shuyu_studio 

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Exhibited Artist ₒ॰°৹º

(Invited Artist) 

Tan Zi Hao

My name “Tan Zi Hao” is already translingual: originally conceived in the Chinese script by my parents as “陳子豪,” but rendered legal in Malaysia in the Latin script as “Tan Zi Hao.” With the Southern Min (or “Hokkien”) surname “Tan” and the Mandarin given name “Zi Hao” in Hanyu Pinyin, my Latinised name is a translingual composite, not only a combination of Hokkien and Mandarin, but also inflected by English and Malay, as “Tan Zi Hao” is pronounced atonally (unlike Sinitic languages), and the “t” of “Tan” is enunciated with an unaspirated voiceless alveolar plosive /t/, unlike, say, the “t” of “Terry” which is aspirated. The language we use to declare our names, to reclaim our stories, to demonstrate selfhood, is readily a language that has betrayed our endeavours. It is the inherent entanglement and the unrecognisable complexity of the self that drive me as an artist, writer, researcher, and educator. In an age of quick technological solutionism, how else can we articulate complexity as value? My works have covered a wide range of subjects from translingual practices, imaginary creatures, to posthuman entanglements. Dwelling on issues of ontological insecurity, my works present a deep investigation about what it means to be singular-plural in an age of global and ecological interdependence. As an artist who moves across different disciplines, I hold a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. I have also published in Art in Translation, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Indonesia and the Malay World, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, ARTMargins, and South East Asia Review (forthcoming). Currently, I am a Senior Lecturer at the Visual Arts Program, Faculty of Creative Arts, Universiti Malaya. I am also a member of the type and design collective Huruf.

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主辦單位｜臺南市政府文化局

協辦單位｜絕對空間

空間營運贊助｜國藝會