The man was looking at an ink painting on an LCD display

Man looking at an ink brush painting on the screen — Display on which ink painting was shown

When you visit the National Palace Museum, nestled quietly in the northern hills of Taipei, you may feel as though you’ve been invited on a journey through time. Most of the artifacts displayed here were collected by imperial courts before the fall of the Qing dynasty—in other words, before 1911 and the Xinhai Revolution. Even the “relatively recent” pieces often date back to the Qing era. That means nearly every item in the museum has borne witness to more than a century of history.

As I wandered deeper into the museum, I suddenly stumbled upon a surprisingly modern space. A massive, high-resolution LCD screen displayed a traditional Chinese ink painting in such stunning detail that I momentarily forgot it wasn’t real silk. The subtle brushstrokes and nuanced gradations of ink looked as though they had been rendered directly onto fabric. Taiwan, after all, is one of the world’s leading producers of electronics, with companies like TSMC supplying semiconductors to global tech giants like Apple. So it makes perfect sense that this island would be at the forefront of merging classical art with cutting-edge display technology.

What’s even more fascinating is that the image on the screen isn’t static. The composition shifts subtly depending on your position, creating the illusion that you’re walking through the landscape depicted in the painting. The man standing in front of me watched the scene intently, arms crossed, completely absorbed. This bold effort to not just preserve tradition but also reimagine its form for the future feels like a perfect expression of what Taipei is today—a city where the old and the new exist not in opposition, but in harmony.

National Palace Museum on Google Map

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