Chinese Name: 文化銀行
Year of Establishment: 2016
Location: Taipei City, Taiwan
Website: http://bankofculture.com
Did You Know?
Since 2019, the Bank of Culture has organized the "Spring Chill" event every year on the eve of Lunar New Year, bringing together the creative works of many outstanding Taiwanese designers and local specialty brands to give a modern face to the traditional Lunar New Year celebrations.
In 2014, Shao Ai-ting (邵璦婷), then fresh out of college, opened a backpacker hostel in Taiwan with a few friends, using it as a base to introduce Taiwanese culture to foreign visitors staying there. Over the next two years, she discovered that much of Taiwan's tangible and intangible cultural heritage was disappearing at an astonishing rate, and she asked herself, "Without culture, what will we do to communicate?" Thus motivated, in 2016, Shao and her team set up a website and a fan page on social media, creating their "Bank of Culture."
By interviewing masters of various traditional arts and crafts in Taiwan, Shao and her team documented them in words, photos, and images, turning them into cultural memories to be stored in the Bank. The history of Taiwan is complex, an interweaving of cultures that has taken on a myriad of forms of its own. In the process of collecting fragments of this diversity, the Bank of Culture has also gradually pieced together a larger, more diverse picture of Taiwan. However, getting to know Taiwan’s culture is only the starting point. Just like the money in a bank account, even if there is a lot of it, it only really has any value when it is taken out and put to use. What the Bank of Culture really wants to do is to “revitalize culture,” to bring old culture back into contemporary life in new forms and explore possibilities for passing it on.
"If we just hold culture in a certain place," says Shao, "it will become like a preserved specimen with no relevance to living people. Only when there is a real connection will people care and cherish it." She believes that the best way to preserve culture is not to keep it locked up and away from the public in museums, but to find ways to bring it back into the everyday experiences of people, who will naturally find ways they can build on it and keep it going.
Since its establishment, the project that the Cultural Bank has devoted most of its efforts to is the "Sustainable Sky Lanterns" project, the most representative example of the team’s efforts to find a new approaches for traditional culture. Sky lanterns have become a classic symbol of Taiwan’s traditional cultural celebrations, with the sight of the beautiful lanterns rising into the sky and bearing the wishes of their owners with them helping it once be ranked the second most important festival in the world by Discovery. However, as environmental awareness has risen and people have become more aware of the other end of the process, the lanterns floating back down to earth and becoming trash, questions and concerns have begun to be raised.
Shao says that many traditions and cultural practices are facing a similar situation, being phased out because they are polluting and wasteful and unable to keep up with the evolving values of society. Although traditional culture and environmental preservation are two different types of value, she says, they are not mutually exclusive, and a balance can be struck between them.
At the end of 2016, she raised funds from the public and began spending nearly three years on research and development to improve the material and structure of the lanterns, replacing the original non-decomposable wire and bamboo frames with all-paper molds to create lanterns that can be completely burned in the sky without leaving behind any waste or pollution. With such added value, the public would be inclined to participate in the festival again and again, allowing for the possibility of the preservation of this traditional celebration. For the 2021 Lantern Festival, the Tourism Bureau of New Taipei City ordered 100 sustainable sky lanterns to be released in Pingxi, and the Bank of Culture passed on most of the profits to the local merchants who collaborated with them.
Shao emphasizes that her sense of purpose was born out of the stories she has collected about these traditional arts and crafts. The Bank of Culture has so far collected deposits of more than 100 Taiwanese cultural memories; "Many people say that learning one more language gives you one more way of seeing the world," says Shao. "To me, learning about one more piece of Taiwanese culture gives me one more way of understanding Taiwan." Projects and activities such as the Sustainable Sky Lanterns and Spring Chill event have always received enthusiastic support on social media, and through the Bank of Culture, Shao Ai-ting has been able to reintroduce people to Taiwan's traditional culture and arts and connect local culture with modern life.
(Photo courtesy of Bank of Culture)