Previously the Taipei Government City Hall, this building is now designated as an historic site, and has been refurbished for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA Taipei). The building reopened on 26 May 2001. Since then, it has become a new landmark on the city's culture map. It is an example of the redevelopment of old spaces while promoting art and culture in the communities.

MOCA Taipei exemplifies a perfect combination of contemporary art, historical architecture, and technology, thanks to the joint efforts of Taipei City Government, the local community, artists, and the business world. Besides displaying contemporary art in new and usual media within a beautiful historical setting, it will bring innovation into Taipei and art into the community. MOCA Taipei seeks to be a valued neighbour in the community.

Position on Development and Planning Direction

The Cross-fertilization of Contemporary Culture
Due to the ongoing tide of digitization and technological progression in our era, contemporary culture has entered a period of unprecedented international dialogue and integration. The future of regional cultures will depend on how the “globalization” trend is converted into a stimulus for dialogue among those cultures and then used to deepen self-awareness of the original cultural matrices and to reposition them. Art trends since the 1980s have opened the boundaries between high and low art, between art and other disciplines, and between art and social life. Art’s diverse media and the content of diverse cultures have mixed together disparate fields of inquiry such as art, science, philosophy, the esthetics of living, and cultural study. MOCA Taipei, which has from the start utilized its historical building as a venue for exhibition and performance, has all the tensile strength of a place that juxtaposes cultural history and contemporary art. Starting from this unique position and serving as an interdisciplinary site for various exhibitions, educational activities, and so on in which diverse contemporary cultures and scholars of different disciplines can stimulate and enrich one another has undoubtedly enhanced this venue’s distinctive artistic and cultural flavor.

A Global and Intercultural Developmental Vision
The globalization phenomenon has already manifested itself in economics, culture, technology, and communication. Elements from the foreign cultures of different regions are being exchanged with increasing frequency. This rich intercultural dialogue and exchange will help to expand people’s horizons and stimulate new, progressive thinking on culture. Even more, it may become a never-ending source for the creative energy that drives contemporary cities.

Innovative Marketing of a Contemporary City
As art derives from life, contemporary society provides the optimal soil for contemporary art, as well as the prime reference in experience exchange among artists, viewers, theorists, and ordinary people. Establishing interaction between boundary-transgressing contemporary art and different social groups in order to bring art outside of the museum and into the life of society, thereby changing the face of the city, has always been one of MOCA’s goals, so it has been gradually building on this foundation. In the future, MOCA will pursue a more multidirectional plan for development, under which art becomes an interface for remolding the urban landscape and experimenting with various novel realms in urban landscape, in order to achieve the forward-looking concept of making the city’s subjective, distinctive qualities a foundation for global dialogue.