Taipei’s art festivals reimagined: online overtures during the pandemic

The Purpose

Taipei found itself pivoting its in-person festival programming; The Taipei Arts Festival, first held in 1998, the Children’s Art Festival, created in 2000, and Nuit Blanche, have all run since 2016. All have become major annual events in the art festival calendar, but were paused in their live forms in 2021 due to lockdowns.

The Challenge

Taipei has encouraged the development of arts festivals over the past 20 years, which have collectively attracted an annual audience of around two million. These have also brought international artists to Taipei, building the city’s reputation for openness and as a melting pot of cultures. With the arrival of pandemic lockdowns, these festivals could not take place in-person, and were redeveloped in online formats.

The total number of visitors to the event’s website was 422,105, and 20,000 people participated in in-person events.

The Solution

The approach to presenting Taipei Arts Festival and Children’s Art Festival online experimented with digital forms – both in terms of ticketing and in how performances were presented. In total, 31 free or paid-for activities were planned, attracting an audience of 422,013. High-quality performances, including dance, took place without an audience but were filmed for later streaming. Other forms offered audiences interactive options, both for performances and exhibitions, as well as options for previews of the works.

Nuit Blanche Taipei is an arts festival where museums, galleries and art centres usually only open in the day, hold special out-of-hours events and ‘light up the night together’. The event usually takes place on the first Saturday in October, with contemporary art exhibitions running for 12 hours through the night, attracting hundreds of thousands of people. Typically, its audience consists of young people aged 20 – 40, creative workers, and groups of friends, but the online format attracted a wider group of remote viewers who had not been able to attend in the past.

In its mostly online form during the pandemic of 2021, Nuit Blanche offered a special interactive website to present five programmes ranging from exhibitions to co-created playlists, talks, film screenings, and live-streamed performances. These events involved a total of 60 art groups, 12 real-time interactive DJs, six groups of expert influencers and six groups of cross-generational writers. By making artworks and programmes available online for only 12 hours on a single night, a sense of coming together for a special occasion was retained. For the small in-person segment, venues and businesses innovated safe ways of allowing the public to visit and enjoy food and drink. The total number of visitors to the event’s website was 422,105, and about 20,000 people participated in in-person events.

The Impact

Looking to the future, there are plans to continue with a hybrid combination of on and offline performances, increasing opportunities for working with international artists. Nuit Blanche is also exploring collaboration with schools, so that student work can be showcased alongside professional art, and a new generation can become more deeply involved. Some challenges remain: although attendance for the mostly online year of 2021 was strong, the public is not yet used to paying for online performances. One route to addressing this is by creating a smoother process from ticket purchase to online experience, all through a single platform. Another approach, for performing arts in particular, is aiming for new milestones in hybrid production, including integrating the virtual and the real, and so developing new forms of performance and building an online theatre. This should begin to attract audiences to a uniquely hybrid experience.

Source: World Cities Culture Report 2022

Images Courtesy © City of Taipei