Ministry of Culture-Performance Venues & Architectural Heritage

National Museum of Taiwan History (NMTH) has signed a letter of intent with the Belgian Comic Strip Center, a museum in Brussels, to initiate comics cultural exchanges between two countries.

NMTH was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture in 2020 to set up the National Comic Museum Preparatory Team to carry out the collection of comic materials, research on the comic history of Taiwan, and promote comic culture, in hopes of conducting more diverse dialogues through international collaboration.

In 2021, NMTH hosted an international comics lecture series "A Voyage to Comic Between Cross-Domain Dialogue (探尋與對話：閱讀世界中的漫畫)." The main speakers at the event included the director of the Belgian Comic Strip Center Isabelle Debekker, researcher of the Kyoto International Manga Museum Yoo Sookyung, and Pierre Lungheretti, director of La Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image in France. They were invited to share their experiences of operating comic museums and the museum’s coping strategies in the face of the pandemic.

Since its inception in 1989, the Belgian Comic Strip Center has displayed and preserved manuscripts and publications of many important Belgian comic works, such as "The Adventures of Tintin" by Hergé and "The Smurfs" by Peyo. Moreover, the museum also cooperated with many countries to display comic works from all over the world. The works of Taiwanese comic artist Chiu Rou-lung (邱若龍) and Sean Chuang (小莊) were also exhibited in the museum.

Through this collaboration, NMTH aims to leverage the rich experience accumulated by the Belgian Comic Strip Center over the past 30 years while promoting research, collection, exhibition, and educational and cultural exchanges between Taiwan and Belgium.