For decades, the words “Made in Taiwan” appeared on the underside of circuit boards and backs of plastic toys, churned out on humming assembly lines and destined to be sold as low-cost exports on foreign shelves. It was a label born out of necessity, one that helped power Taiwan’s rapid postwar growth and transformed the country into one of Asia’s economic tigers. But in the years since, it has slowly come to mean something new: a badge of creativity, craftsmanship and national pride.

Nowhere is this reinvention more visible than in Taipei, the country’s capital cradled in the mountains of the north. Once seen as a quick stopover on the way to Asia’s bigger metropolises and beach retreats, it’s now rapidly growing as a destination in its own right. Over the past few years, Taipei-based Starlux Airlines has steadily expanded its intercontinental network, while big-name hotel arrivals such as Capella (and soon, Four Seasons and Park Hyatt) have put the city firmly on the jet-set radar.



What visitors will find is a city that embraces its past, but also looks boldly into an uncertain future. Its streets, buzzing with motorcycle traffic, weave past incense-swirled temples, neon-lit night markets and ambitious architectural developments such as the new OMA-designed Taipei Performing Arts Center. Pocket parks and preserved colonial shophouses sit beside gleaming glass towers; community-run craft hubs live on inside old factory depots.

From the ateliers, kitchens and galleries in between, a new generation of homegrown creatives has given the “Made in Taiwan” label fresh meaning. Not as a nostalgic nod to their country’s industrial boom times, but as deeply personal expressions of culture, heritage and terroir, all fuelled by Taiwan’s complex identity as a forward-looking nation shaped by an Indigenous, Chinese and Japanese past. In the pages that follow, five Taipei-based creatives share their take.



 

The Locavore Champion

From bustling night markets that smell of scallion pancakes and fermented tofu to mom-and-pop kitchens that have been doling out lu rou fan (braised pork rice) or salty soy milk for generations, cookery is deeply embedded into Taiwan’s DNA. And while chefs cooking on the finer end of the dining spectrum have long looked abroad for inspiration (Taipei’s French, Japanese and Cantonese restaurants are among the best in Asia), many of Taiwan’s culinary kingpins have now turned to their country’s soil to tell new stories through food.

“For me, cooking is about life,” says Taichung-born chef Kai Ho, who spent almost a decade abroad in the US, China and Singapore before returning to Taiwan to open his proudly locavore Taïrroir restaurant in Taipei’s ritzy Dazhi district. “It’s not about showing off technique. It’s about sharing, feeling and making the ingredients speak for themselves. They all have their own stories, we’re just the editors.”



Taiwan’s wildly diverse topography means that chefs have plenty of bounty to work with. “You drive one hour [from Taipei] and you’re in 1,200m-high mountains,” marvels Ho. “Drive 15 minutes the other way and you’re at the beach. That’s why our produce is so diverse.”

At Taïrroir, Ho puts these seasonal treasures at the heart of his artfully plated creations, which combine classic Taiwanese flavours with the French techniques he has honed throughout his career. Summer’s fleeting bamboo shoots, crisp and sweet as pear, are picked at their peak and served with slices of scallop and aiyu (a beloved local fruit jelly); forest mushrooms come prepared in a silk-smooth potage.

As the chef behind the world’s only three-Michelin-starred Taiwanese restaurant, Ho might be at the vanguard of the island’s locavore movement, but he’s not alone. A younger generation has followed his lead, with a new wave including young-gun chefs such as Ed Lin of Sur- in Taichung, who draws from central Taiwan’s produce, and the team behind Taipei’s minimalist Ban Bo, who turn Taiwan’s ubiquitous rechao drinking foods into fine-dining morsels.



For Ho, though, it’s not about elevating Taiwanese food, but a natural progression of a cuisine that has always been an amalgamation of global influences. “I don’t want to ‘educate’ diners,” he says. “I want to change their mindset. People grew up thinking that their food fits in a certain box, but there’s always another angle.”

The Indigenous Weavers

Long before Han Chinese began their migration to Taiwan, indigenous people were already weaving their stories into the island’s landscape. From the rugged slopes of the central mountains to the jungle-covered islets in the far south, more than a dozen different tribes dwelled in colourful rural communities, each with their unique language, rituals and crafts. Today, though, Taiwan’s indigenous people make up less than three per cent of the island’s total population of 23 million. And while many of them have assimilated into urban life, their cultures and traditions live on in surprising new ways.

One such example is the umbrella sedge-weaving tradition of the Pancah people of Taiwan’s east coast, which forms the foundation of Kamaro’an, a Taipei-based design studio reinterpreting ancestral crafts through a contemporary lens. Founded in 2015 by designers Yun Fann Chang, Shane Liu and Makuta’ay tribe member Tipus Hafay, the studio collaborates with tribal craftspeople at their workshops in Taipei and Hualien to create home objects and leather accessories that draw on time-honoured techniques such as sedge weaving, rattan basketry and natural dyeing with betel nuts and myrtle leaves. “These crafts are like an emotional language that links cultures and generations,” Chang says. “It’s the product of a pure, close relationship between people and their surroundings, which has always been precious.”

Kamaro’an’s workshop in the Da’an district doubles as a shoppable showroom where products are presented with photos, sketches and vernacular objects collected during frequent field trips and meetings with the tribespeople still practising their ancient crafts. Gourd-shaped bags from braided straw and woven leather riff on traditional Pancah pottery; leather iPhone pouches incorporate sedge-weaving patterns; sculptural lamp shades from umbrella sedge nod to the waves that lash the island’s eastern shores.

The brand made its debut at Paris Fashion Week in 2024, but the focus remains firmly local. “In Taiwan, indigenous culture isn’t always visible,” Chang says. “But it shapes how we think about our identity, and about how to live in balance with the world around us.”



The Tea-Totaller

In Taiwan, tea is everywhere. It’s steeped in family kitchens, poured with tapioca pearls in countless boba tea shops, and sipped by centenarians in the shade of temple trees. Its cultivation story began in the early 19th century, when the first plants were brought over from southeast China’s Fujian province, and farmers in Taiwan’s mist-draped highlands began cultivating oolong, green and black varietals. Today, the island’s high-mountain oolongs are often referred to as the “champagne of teas”.

Taipei has no shortage of traditional tea houses specialising in meticulously orchestrated gongfu cha tea ceremonies, but rigid rituality and, often, a language barrier, can make it a rather intimidating experience for first-timers. A slew of new-wave tea bars, like Wolf Tea and Hermit’s Hut, have made tastings more accessible through curated flights and English-language instructions. But at Tei by O’Bond, a blink-and-you-miss-it bar in the Xinyi district, the ritual takes on a wholly new form: cocktails.

Tei by O'Bond

“Tea is just like wine,” maintains the bar’s founder, Tom Liu, who has visited more than a hundred tea farms across Taiwan to find the best varieties for his drinks list. “Even two trees grown a few metres apart can taste completely different. It all depends on the soil, the weather and the person who picks it.”

Liu treats tea as a building block in his complex creations. Magnolia oolong shows up as a floral aroma in a clarified drink with peach juice, osmanthus and floral honey, and as a rim dusted with Taiwanese green tea powder. For another drink, Liu pairs roasted tea stems with beetroot-infused gin, clarified black cherry juice and Cynar into a Negroni-style serve, while Taiwan’s renowned Ruby Black Tea flavours a Shiraz-like creation with Applejack, Riesling and rosella flowers from Taitung.

Tom Liu

Liu’s approach to mixology fits into a wider movement in Taipei’s bar culture. At Indulge Experimental Bistro, mixologist Aki Wang distils, clarifies and experiments with local ingredients such as lotus root, wax gourd and homegrown herbs, while Da’an’s Bar Pine mixes drinks with Taiwanese shiitake mushrooms, bamboo shoots and perilla leaf. “When you’re drinking our cocktails, you’re travelling with us,” Liu says. “We’re telling the story of Taiwan.”

 

The Art Scene-Shaper

Standing out among Asia’s art-market powerhouses – Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo – is no easy feat, but Taipei’s contemporary-art scene is slowly building momentum. From the gallery-lined alleys in the Da’an district to the revamped warehouses-turned-artist ateliers in Songshan, aficionados visiting Taipei are never far from a creative fix. “There are festivals, art fairs and forums throughout the year, and new exhibitions of all sizes open almost every week,” says Pei-Yu Lin, director of Taipei’s Project Fulfill Art Space.

This vigour is rooted in Taiwan’s particular conditions: a colonial past, decades of martial law, waves of migration, and its current position as a democratic, tech-forward and free-thinking outlier in the region. The country’s contemporary artists work across a wide range of media, but new media art (video, sound and kinetic installations) has become particularly prominent. “We call ourselves a technology island,” Lin points out, “so it makes sense that artists here are so proficient in digital tools.”

Project Fulfill

At her gallery in the Da’an district, which she launched in 2008, Lin champions the artists filtering Taiwan’s cultural heritage through a contemporary lens. Among the names she represents at global art fairs – and during frequently changing exhibitions at Project Fulfill – are Wang Chung-Kun and Wang Fujui, who have long been pioneers in Taiwan’s experimental sound-art scene. Others include Taipei-born Zhang Xu Zhan, who animates family memories through intricate paper effigies and hand-cut stop-motion, and painter Hsieh Mu-Chi, who revisits Taiwan’s painting history in kaleidoscopic, wall-spanning pieces.

And Taipei’s art boom shows no signs of slowing down. Last April, the ambitious New Taipei City Art Museum opened in the southwestern reaches of the municipality, while the four-decades-old Taipei Fine Arts Museum is expanding into a full-fledged arts precinct worth about $180 million. “When it comes to art,” Lin says, “Taipei never sleeps.”

Songshan Creative Park

 

The Bamboo Revivalists

From a light-flooded studio down a quiet alley in Taipei’s Da’an district, Chuzi Dialogue aims to redefine what traditional crafts can mean in modern-day Taiwan. Run by husband-and-wife duo Yang Chu-Chun, a bamboo weaver from Changhua in central Taiwan, and Eric Zhang, a product designer who previously worked at local design studio Tzulaï, the atelier, cafe and workshop space invites its customers to slow down in this fast-paced city.

Chu-Chun picked up the centuries-old art of weaving zhuzi (which means bamboo in Mandarin, Taiwan’s lingua franca) during a workshop by a master weaver from Nantou, widely considered the heartland of this traditional technique. At first, it was isolating – “most of my classmates were retirees,” she says – but she eventually saw a future for bamboo that would appeal to her own generation. Today, her pieces fuse traditional materials and techniques with her personal touch: mobiles that unfold into cloud-like forms when suspended from the ceiling, or wing-shaped oil diffusers that smell of camphor and hinoki.



Last March, the pair converted part of their studio into a concept store and cafe, serving local tea and slow-drip coffee from beans grown in central-southern Taiwan’s Alishan mountains alongside a range of artworks and ceramics by befriended designers from Taiwan and Japan. Chu-Chun also hosts bamboo-weaving workshops to foster a next generation of artisans. “Over time, you can see [the students’] body language change,” she notes. “They become more relaxed. The work reveals their personality.”

For the couple, the point isn’t to scale up, but to stay grounded. “Taiwan industrialised so fast,” says Chu-Chun. “But crafts remind you to think about what you really need. When you shape something with your own hands, it invites you to think. It shapes you back as a person.”

All photos by Chris Schalkx