The Kaohsiung Municipal Museum of Fine Arts (hereafter referred to as the Kaohsiung Museum) was established in 1994 and is located in the Neiwei Park within the northwest metropolitan area of Kaohsiung City. It occupies the former wetland area of “Neiwei.” At the northern edge of the district, the Qishan and Banping Mountains, together with the north‑south oriented Shoushan to the west, converge to form a scenic landscape of surrounding mountains and water that the Love River, flowing through the area, completes. In 2017, the Kaohsiung Museum was reorganized as a municipal professional cultural institution under the Kaohsiung City Administration, continuing to cultivate local culture and collect works by Taiwanese artists. Each year, the museum promotes emerging artists through the “Kaohsiung Award” and the “KS Kaohsiung Experimental Field” competitions. In addition to curating thematic exhibitions and artist research shows, the museum also strives to collaborate with world‑class museums, bringing a variety of large international exhibitions to provide the public with a broader, more diverse contemporary art experience. In recent years, the museum has actively developed online interactive resources, such as a 360° panoramic exhibition space, online guided tours with interactive sensory resources, an online art database (including a visual media database, the Nativis Contemporary Memory Project database, and the Baiyue Silent Reading Collection), a YouTube channel, and other curatorial updates. This has made the museum not only a place to visit for cultural and artistic experiences but also a platform for knowledge sharing.
The main museum building is a six‑storey structure with four floors above ground and two below. The first floor houses an international temporary exhibition and a high‑ceiling contemporary art gallery. The second floor focuses on thematic curations or artist research exhibitions. The third floor contains a large, diversified Southern history collection. The fourth floor serves as a space for contemporary experimental creations. The underground level includes a 352‑seat lecture hall and a studio for group art education, as well as an art research room that holds over 46,000 volumes of art books and materials, freely available for browsing and study.
In 2005, the Kaohsiung Museum’s “Visitor Service Center” on the west side of the park was converted into a Children’s Museum, making it the first public museum in the country dedicated solely to children. With its three‑floor main building and outdoor garden, it is an ecological landscape park that combines culture, art, education, leisure, and play. Unlike the arts and humanities education in schools, the Children’s Museum integrates museum education and child art education, combining interactive displays with art‑education outreach activities. Through thematic planning, it offers rich, fun, and lively educational displays. Using play, creation, exploration, observation, experience, and imagination, children learn through art.
Recently, the Children’s Museum has combined the ecological landscape of Neiwei Park and the resources of the Kaohsiung Museum to focus on deepening child art education. It promotes child art education, integrates community and school resources, and moves toward goals of “ecology, environmental protection, culture, and art.” The surrounding trees provide shade, and the front sand pit is a shared playground for parents and children. The 43‑hectare museum campus hosts more than 40 art sculptures and public artworks, distributed among the park’s lakes, trees, and grasslands, creating diverse visual effects and extending the natural environment into the museum’s exhibition and educational space.
From the museum’s diverse visitation mechanisms, the establishment of the Kaohsiung Museum Bookshop, the arrival of quality restaurants, to the recent development of ecological tours, cultural creative markets, and various outdoor activities, the core spirit is to create a “one‑day artistic ecological lifestyle circle” experience for viewers, realizing the museum’s role as a platform for artistic life and aesthetic experience. The museum campus includes three cultural buildings: the Kaohsiung Municipal Museum of Fine Arts, the Children’s Museum, and the Neiwei Art Center, making it a cultural hub that blends ecology, art, and leisure. In the natural setting of insects chirping, birds singing, and shimmering waves, art grows like a green sprout, rooting, flourishing, and thriving under the bright Southern Taiwan sun.