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 04. Pinglin Tea

On day four we took a bus outside of the city to see the Pinglin Tea Cultural Landscape as well as their small town area. Up until this point we had mostly been exploring the city, so I really appreciated getting to go further outside of Taipei and see what nature areas here in Taiwan are like. The previous day we had picked a tea-related project with our group, so this was the perfect trip to get inspired for our project.

View over Pinglin

05. National Palace Museum, Yongkang

The National Palace Museum was so beautiful; I was really glad to have a tour guide that could explain certain pieces to us, as I would’ve been so overwhelmed if not for her. My favorite part of the museum was the wall with all the symbols that were on the ancient piece, and then the translation to modern Chinese characters. The way that language changes and grows over time has always been an interesting part of history in many cultures.

Translation wall

Overall, the Museum was a great way to expand my knowledge of Taiwanese history and appreciation for Taiwanese arts.

From there we headed over to Yongkang street with our project groups where we stopped at a cute café for snacks and work time. Here we ironed out many details and split up work that we could do that night.

06. Yingge Ceramics Museum, Tai Hwa Pottery, Presentation Preparation

Going to the ceramics museum before painting our own pottery was great because I could get inspired for my own piece. Over the past few days I’ve been seeing a lot of horses in Taiwanese art, and so I knew I wanted to paint some horses on my cup. Tai Hwa Pottery was such a cool building, I loved that we had the big windows overlooking the trains occasionally passing as we worked. This was such a fun hands on activity, and I am so curious to see what my plate and cup will look like after they are fired.

Tile wall at the Yingge Ceramics Museum

Horse art example from the NPM

Prepping for the presentation was a ton of work but super rewarding. We worked a lot longer than I was expecting to, but we wanted to make sure every detail of the project was perfect. I personally had a lot of drawings to do to illustrate the experience that people would get if they purchased our product. In the middle of our work time we had a critique that made us think about what the motivation behind our product is and why people would actually want to keep it afterwards. After we figured that out things went much more smoothly as we put together our slides.

07. Presentation Day!

We all met at NTU a little early to time out our presentation and get all the last things figured out. Going first was a little stressful, but everything turned out great and we were all pleased to present something that we could be proud of.

I am really grateful to my group for putting in the effort and making this happen in such a short amount of time. So many great ideas were created and used, and I feel like our final project had a little bit of something from each person.

Group 4!