Tainan Begins

 

The high speed rail into Tainan was so easy and the views were nice, I almost wished the train ride was longer. Jumping right into meeting the NCKU students was such a different experience than the Vision Zone at SCU, which was exciting because I knew we would get a different side of the college life here. Seeing all of the students’ intro presentations was really fun, everybody was a bit of a character / had at least one thing on there they were really passionate about. I got to tour with Change and Ming, who were a great duo for guiding around campus because they had a similar sense of humor and kind of veered off the schedule to show us what they thought were the best spots on campus.

After that, we got paired with our groups, I met Ming and David and got to know Pfeifer and Carolyn a bit more. I was a bit too tired to really think about any sort of design work or project, so some rest at the hotel was needed, along with Austin and I getting scammed by the laundry room (do not use the dryer on the right). Change sent an insane amount of food + nightlife recommendations in the discord, and a few of us decided to go get beef soup with Yu Shyan and then went on over to a listening room / bar that was really fun.

Our free day was a bit less packed than the one in Taipei, but really enjoyable. Jessy, Kalin and I went to Cave Cafe, which had really good drinks, but also some incredible branding and interior design. It was filled with an organized clutter of vintage notecards, lamps, markers and cool bat logo. We spent way too long there drawing and geeking out about the branding and merch before we went to a thrift store and got lunch. We went in and out of a few stores before getting absolutely soaked in the rain and heading back to the hotel to shower before going out to the night market in the evening.

The next day, we got to have a joint lecture from Meichun and Wan Ling Chang at NCKU, which felt like we were actually students there, as opposed to just working with the students like at SCU. I still felt a bit lost with the project in terms of ideas. After just doing a Taiwanese culture-inspired project a couple days prior, I felt like I had to go back to a similar pool of inspiration minus the ideas my team and every other team had come up with. However, we got a lot more inspiration right afterwards. We went to Jonathan’s Bookstore to learn about the indigo dyeing process and do a workshop with it. I had no idea how many ingredients and processes were involved, it was fascinating. I was really into how deep the color it produced was and got a lot of ideas of inspo from the different patterns they had on display. Learning how to fold the simplest ones made me appreciate the technical skill that went into producing all of the harder ones.

I was thinking a lot about how to incorporate some of the technique or color into a design project, possibly with recycled fabrics, but it was pretty vague. I am happy with how my scarf turned out, but now I want to try the other folding techniques. We got some really good noodles afterwards and then had a relaxing night in. The next day was a long brainstorming session with the group, + an excursion for inspiration. Ming drove us to get a really good lunch, and then we went through all 6 floors of the Hayashi department store. We have seen a lot of traditional crafts and techniques on this trip, but that store had so many commercial products inspired by them that it gave a different side of it that was useful. We also went to the art museum, which was cool, but not as related, although there was an exhibit on river pollution.

My group was a bit tired and brain dead when we got back, but we managed to come up with a few interesting ideas and delegated tasks for the presentation… I am excited to see what we come up with. I have a lot of ideas floating around from the lectures and the the city itself, but it is still cloudy and vague, so I am figuring out how to tie it all together.