Since 1997, the Fubon Art Foundation has played “a pioneering role in Taiwan, bringing art away from white walls and into everyone’s life in the form of a wall-less art museum” by funding and organising projects despite lacking its own venue, says its chief executive, Maggie Ueng. Now, though, it has embraced walls with a glossy new space, located within the A25 commercial complex in Taipei’s downtown Xinyi district. The Fubon Art Museum is the inaugural Taiwan project of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, in collaboration with the Taipei and Singapore firm Kris Yao Artech.
“The location is our advantage,” Ueng says, allowing the museum to “do a lot of lifestyle activities interacting with the surrounding area, such as combining art with fashion or sports cars.”
Ueng and her husband Richard Tsai regularly rank among Taiwan’s top collectors. Tsai and his brother Daniel co-own Fubon Financial Holdings, one of the world’s richest finance companies. The museum will draw from both corporate and family collections, Ueng says, as well as from the foundation’s long experience and expansive global network.
Since its opening on 4 May, Fubon Art Museum has sparked some controversy on social media for the ticket price of its opening shows—NT$1,200 (US$37). In a city where most museums charge well under US$10, the price shock is heightened by Fubon Financial Holdings’ stature: last year it reported net profits of NT$66.02bn ($2.04bn). The museum does, however, offer discounted NT$200 ($6) tickets for students and teachers, part of an emphasis on youth outreach.
Ueng, who is also the museum’s director, declined to put figures on the cost of its construction or annual operations, but says that each exhibition has cost into the millions of dollars. “The transportation and insurance costs alone were very high” for the first show, she says, and “took more than two years to plan”. The opening exhibition is True Nature: Rodin and the Age of Impressionism (until 23 September), a collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), in the 720 sq. m ground floor Water Gallery. The third floor Sun and Star Galleries, a combined 1,136 sq. m, debuted with In Touch: Collection of Fubon (until 5 August). It features six male, ethnic Chinese artists, half modern and half contemporary: Sanyu, Zao Wou-ki, Yun Gee, Paul Chiang, Su Xiaobai and Wang Huaiqing. The entire facility totals 10,000 sq. m, plus an outdoor plaza for public art, currently displaying a sculpture by Jaume Plensa.
Ueng says the cooperation with Lacma will span the next ten years, and grew out of her personal friendship with its director, Michael Govan. From 2018 to 2022, Ueng donated $1m to an arts and architecture fellowship at her alma mater, the University of California, through which she met Govan and began supporting Lacma’s expansion plan while introducing more Taiwanese artists into its programming.
Fubon will organise a Van Gogh exhibition next in cooperation with the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, plus a solo show of the Japanese sculptor Susumu Shingu. Ueng highlights that the Fubon Art Foundation has also promoted Taiwanese artists showing abroad. “We believe that art transcends nationality, with a common language and universal values,” she says.
In addition to the all-male slate of artists, the context section of the Rodin exhibition includes not a single female contemporary Impressionist. “Fubon’s collection is very diverse and extensive,” Ueng says. The first collection exhibition was “mainly based on the concept of ‘beauty of space’ and ‘touch’, and does not deliberately take gender as a theme of selection”. Next year the museum will hold a “large-scale solo exhibition of a female artist” in collaboration with Japan’s Mori Art Museum, “so please wait and see”, she says.
