Kaohsiung's Hidden Gem: Kinma Hotel Becomes a Contemporary Art Museum

At the foot of Shoushan in Kaohsiung stands the Kinma Hotel, a building carrying half a century of military memories that is about to celebrate its tenth year as a contemporary art museum. This last surviving military transit station in Taiwan has been transformed into a landmark venue leading the city's aesthetics, through the collaboration between the city's Urban Development Bureau and the private 'Yukon Group · Yung Tien Art'.

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Built in 1967, the Kinma Hotel once served as a transit station for soldiers heading to the Kinmen and Matsu front lines. It was left idle in the late 1990s after the end of the Cold War, until the Urban Development Bureau invited the Yukon Group to launch an adaptive-reuse project in 2016. The group invested NT$130 million and spent two years on meticulous restoration. Bureau director Wu Yen-wen noted that the core difficulty lay in making an 'old building fit new regulations'.

The team insisted on preserving the original grille walls, door pillars, and even the historic military numbers, iron-handrail staircases and terrazzo floors. Wu stressed that the level of care was no less than restoring a statutory monument, ultimately transforming a Cold War relic into a contemporary art centre full of humanistic atmosphere.

Reborn as the 'ALIEN Art Centre — Kinma Hotel Contemporary Art Museum', it has become an important interdisciplinary art practice platform in Kaohsiung.

Forward-Looking Art Programmes

The museum has actively promoted forward-looking programmes in recent years. The 'Video Sandbox' open-call project, now in its third year of collaboration with academia, nurtures emerging video artists through experimental exhibitions and a 'research, creation, display' mechanism.

In terms of curation and international connections, the museum has launched several internationally-minded exhibitions covering abstract art, material research, artificial intelligence, spatial perception and light art, while deepening the link between art and everyday life through forums, lectures, children's art education, cross-disciplinary performances and inter-museum collaborations.

It will continue expanding cooperation with overseas creators and international art platforms, with the second chapter of 'Dust and Gold' planned for next year in collaboration with a Barcelona-based international art platform.

Connecting Pier-2 and Hamasen

Director Wu added that the museum has not only revitalised the old-town shopping districts around Gushan and Yancheng, but will continue to link with light-rail highlights to connect the Pier-2 Art Center and the Hamasen historic area, expanding the city's cultural and creative momentum. A decade of achievement has validated the vision of 'artistic spatial experience',

 allowing a historic building to keep writing its next brilliant decade through the interplay of art and public good.