Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art, Kinmen Island: A Permanent Sanctuary for Art in a Demilitarized Zone

For much of the twentieth century, Kinmen was a key beachhead in Cold War campaigns to "Reclaim the Mainland" or "Liberate Taiwan." Although those tensions persist in other arenas, the island has slowly been relieved of its military value, and now it finds itself home to 2,000 vestigial arsenals, bunkers and military facilities. The local government has called on the examples of the Venice Biennale's naval base and of culturally fertile borderlands everywhere in announcing plans to transform as many as a third of the bunkers into exhibition spaces and another third into permanent, site-specific installations. This first round includes artists from both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Subsequent ones will pull artists from throughout Asia and then the world. Visual art leads, with strong components of architecture, film, theater, music, performance and, of course, community planning of exceptional scope and ambition.… (more)