Tainan Foodscape: Cultural Memory and Painting as a Sensory Practice - Wen-chin Hou

A city’s cultural memory is often deeply embedded in the everyday activities that are repeated day after day. Eating is one of life’s most intimate experiences and an important gateway to understanding a city. In Tainan, local foods have taken shape over a long period of time, carrying traces of the climate, local produce, migration, industries, beliefs, family life, and neighborhood communities. Rice dishes, soups, pastries, seafood, and a wide range of local flavors have gradually shaped a distinctive culinary identity known as the “Tainan taste” through generations of tradition and changes in everyday life. This season, Kaohsiung International Airport presents Tainan Foodscape: Cultural Memory and Painting as a Sensory Practice - Wen-chin Hou as its curatorial theme. Food provides a way of experiencing and understanding Tainan, inviting us to consider how taste, aroma, color, form, and scenes from everyday life are intertwined. At the heart of the project is a question of how cultural identity is shaped through our embodied experiences, everyday practices, and collective memories, offering a form of “local studies” that traces the making of local culture. Through his paintings, Wen-chin Hou brings to life the human and cultural memories of southern Taiwan held within its food traditions.
 

Artist Wen-chin Hou looks closely at everyday life with a realist eye, recording the city through sensitive and expressive brushwork. His mature style is marked by a strong sense of reality, while also capturing the emotions and memories that have become embedded in the city over time. His work can be seen as a form of “visual archaeology of food culture,” extending the tradition of outdoor painting into a thoughtful form of “painting in action” that engages with contemporary cultural issues. The artist searches for traces of local culture in the details of everyday life, preserving fragments of the city through his brush: the crowded stalls of traditional markets, the worn surfaces of tables in old shops, the moment food is placed on the table, and the spontaneous expressions of people on the streets all become essential elements of his compositions, preserving the texture of life as it is. His sketch-like brushwork also gives the paintings a sense of immediacy and movement, creating the feeling that time is unfolding before our eyes. By making food a subject of his paintings and placing it within the context of urban life, Wen-chin Hou transforms food into a medium connecting people, places, time, and memory, together forming the cultural texture of life in Tainan.
 

Date：2026.10.08~2027.01.06
Location：Central Gallery in Kaohsiung International Airport
Supervising Organization: Kaohsiung International Airport
Organizer: Ever Rich Foundation
Co-Organizer: Ever Rich Duty Free Shop