Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) is the leading institute of art higher education in Taiwan. TNUA is currently the chair of the Asian League of Institutes of the Arts (ALIA) and is the member of the Shared Campus platform co-founded by partner institutes in Hong Kong, Singapore, Kyoto, London, and Zurich. Beside international cooperation, TNUA has long been working closely with local partners including communities in the neighboring Beitou area as well as crafts and art practitioners within and beyond Taiwan. The TNUA has seven schools, including schools on performing arts, fine arts, humanities and School of Culture Resources.

The School of Culture Resources and Center for Traditional Arts of the TNUA have been involved in the HaB program since the year 2014 and will continue this role in the next stage of HaB. The School of Culture Resources has four graduate institutes on Cultural Heritage, Museum Studies, Art Education and Art Management, an international master program on Cultural Industries and a PhD program on Cultural Heritage and Art Creativity. Equipped with graduate programs of different levels (Master and PhD) serving students from multiple cultural backgrounds (many are from central and south American countries), the School of Culture Resources should provide the space for integrating the developed pedagogical outcomes of the HaB into teaching and research. Working together with the School, the TNUA Center for Traditional Arts can also serve as an inter-university platform open for faculties from various disciplines as well as craft practitioners and local communities who have been long term partners of the Center.

The conceptual terrains of Indigo and craft respectively under the HaB site of knowledge ‘Practice’, were experimented as a new modes of pedagogical access breaking existing hierarchies in the higher education including knowledge forms, regions of knowledge and owners of knowledge,  in the first stage of HaB through the ‘Indigo across borders’ project led by TNUA. For the next stage of HaB, we envision a cross-regional curriculum development initiative on Indigo and Craft, in collaboration with partners in Burkina Faso (Institute of Social Studies), Mali (Institute of Humanities), Japan (Kyoto Seika University), Thailand (Chiang Mai University) and India (Ambedkar University). We envision a curriculum on craft and indigo using different entry points such as heritage, community, gender, migration, ecology and postcolonial reflections. The curriculum aims to shape a new form of knowledge formation and transmission by bringing together the places of knowledges (neglected for long) including local ‘field places’ to be turned into legitimate spaces of higher education in which multiple forms of narratives are being tested for a truly co-teaching and co-creation of knowledge model.

Contact persons:

Prof. Lee Chia-Yi, Vice President, TNUA

Dr. Jennie Lin, Dean of Research and Development, TNUA

Dr. Min-Chin Kay Chiang, Associate Professor of the Graduate Institute of Architecture and Cultural Heritage; Director of Center for Traditional Arts, TNUA, HaB PI