Taitung is a living school. Here, we relearn how to live, breathe, think, and simply be.

The 2026 Taitung Expo is a declaration of the city itself. Across more than twenty exhibitions dispersed throughout Taitung’s former railway station, old town streets, libraries, and open public spaces, each site reveals a different facet of life in the region. Beginning with a Slow Economy seed planted in Taitung’s soil, ideas take root, reach upward, and gradually extend into themes including Air, Water,Forces of Nature, Sound, Drift, Life, Slow Economy, The Taitung Brand, and Sustainable Taitung — sketching, layer by layer, a blueprint that belongs only to this place. Yet faced with an expo sprawling across an entire city, one may wonder where to begin. Perhaps The Living School is the place to start.

As the Main Venue, The Living School offers a playful and accessible point of entry into the Taitung Expo. Through games, exercises, and embodied experiences, people are encouraged to enter the Expo in their own way. Why does this city feel at once so wild and so open? How are Austronesian cultures intertwined with the land? What meanings emerge through repetition and cyclical practice?

Carrying these experiences and exercises into the city, people are invited to continue into Taitung itself, where each exhibition offers its own response. We hope only to spark curiosity — using this venue as a point of departure for an expedition across Taitung.

Within The Living School, there are no conventional classrooms — only free-form exercises shaped by the rhythms of Taitung. 🕤

Like every first day of school, the journey begins at the registration desk, where each person receives a Practice Book. Stepping inside, one may first encounter stories drawn from everyday Austronesian life. Yet following Austronesian traditions of movement and exchange, the space also invites visitors to write stories of their own: fragments of home, childhood, adulthood, and personal memory.

Further inside lies the domain of sensation. The sounds of Taitung, the scent of dry grass, and the shifting light of the natural world unfold simultaneously. Some impressions are immediately recognizable; others linger only as a vague bodily familiarity — and perhaps that feeling itself is deeply Taitung. Here, fleeting perceptions may be traced and carried forward as notes of the present moment.

Practice, too, requires practice. Drawn from fragments of exhibitions across the Expo : the swing of a bat, the rhythm of weaving, learning to surrender to natural forces, or simply the pleasure of doing nothing at all. Even within a minute, the body begins to remember how to run wild, slow down, and empty itself.

Passing through displays shaped by the Slow Economy — where “SLOW FOR LIFE” is understood as a philosophy of depth rather than speed — you eventually arrive at the final section, a space reflecting on sustainability and the future of Taitung. Here, we wait together, accompany one another, and continue looking ahead. As for Taitung’s present, all the curiosity, discoveries, and stories waiting to unfold have already scattered themselves across the city.

Thank you for being here, and welcome to the Taitung Expo.