We Are Small but Important: Exploring Child Participation in Taiwan with Monica Eileen Patterson
BY CHUN-HUI WANG (Affiliate - Children’s Museology Cluster)
March 17, 2025
After attending the 2024 International Symposium on Children’s Education in the Art Museum on Designing Exhibition for Children, Dr. Patterson spent an additional week in Taiwan to learn more about the current state of child participation in Taiwan. I helped organize her stay and arranged site visits to some of the most important places implementing child participation, including the Huashan Prairie Playground, the Puppetry Art Center of Taipei, and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.
Three members of the Beyond Play-Making professional network (Yui-Hwa Lee, I-Hsin Chen, and Yi-Hui Hsieh) shared strategies for engaging children in the development of communal spaces at the Huashan Prairie Playground (Photo by Chun-Hui Wang).
A discussion on how to engage more children as partners at the Children’s Future Museum (Photo by I-Hsin Chen).
The Huashan Prairie Playground emerged from an experimental project led by city government and the HAD interior design company in 2017. The project involved many children’s rights advocates and children who participated in making the playground more playful. I invited three members of Beyond Play-Making, one of the pioneering organizations for children's right to play, to share their experiences with us regarding the development of the playground. The Huashan Prairie Playground was the first to invite children to provide suggestions and implement their ideas on the future developments of this communal space. In a series of seven workshops, children of different ages were encouraged to play freely while adults facilitated their play when requested. Adults observed their play behaviors, collected their ideas about play, and discussed their needs and ideas about how the playground should be designed. Feedback from the children contributed to the playground's renovation.
After touring the playground, we discussed another prominent topic in Taiwan: the construction of the National Children's Future Museum. Although the preparatory team of the museum has stated on the project website that they promise to provide more opportunities for child participation, the project is still largely adult-led. The members of Beyond Play-Making were interested in how to engage more children as partners in discussions about the Children’s Future Museum. Dr. Patterson suggested using participation as a core method in engaging with children to learn from them about what the museum should be and asking them how to make ‘the future’ a specific and accessible topic to enable more children and adults to engage with it. The entire interview was posted on the Eyes on Place website.
The director and puppeteer of the Puppetry Art Center of Taipei, Yi-Wei Tsai, has devoted himself to making traditional arts accessible and engaging for children (Photo by Chun-Hui Wang).
Our second stop was the Puppetry Art Center of Taipei. I chose to take Dr. Patterson there because it serves as an excellent example of how traditional arts can be made accessible and engaging for children. For instance, the permanent exhibition, The Tiny & The Big, introduces the history of Taiwan’s traditional and contemporary puppetry through the lens of children’s daily lives. By incorporating various interactive designs, the exhibition encourages children to learn about puppetry through play. Moreover, it provides opportunities for children to take the lead and try their own hand at puppetry and puppet design. These kinds of fun and interactive experiences are all too rare in Taiwanese museums.
The last stop was the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, where between 2021-2022, I developed, in collaboration with children and various child advocates, the Art+Play Space and the educational exhibition grounded in the principles of Children’s Museology. Unfortunately, the museum decided to close the educational exhibition and transform it into a picture book area. As a result, Dr. Patterson could only visit the Art+Play Space.
The Art+Play Space is located in the museum’s basement. The aim of the space is to encourage children aged 0-12 to explore fine arts through play. We designed and customized educational playsets based on the museum’s collections, invited children to be our partners to test the playsets, and arranged them into five play zones according to children's developmental stages. In the Art+Play Space, children can observe, think, and act like Taiwanese pioneering artists, encountering various aspects of Taiwan’s aesthetics. For instance, they can create their own potted plants with multi-colored wooden leaves, trace the details of a friend or family member’s face on a transparent plexi-glass panel depicting a crowd, manipulate magnetic pieces of various colors and designs to create their own paintings, construct three-dimensional sculptures or simple machines from wooden pieces, rope, and wheels; or even record their own short film using a light table and different props and backgrounds.
In Taiwan, most museums prefer to collaborate with adult artists when they organize exhibitions for children. Since these exhibitions are artist-created, they often come with certain regulations and restrictions for children. The Art+Play Space aimed to challenge this approach by involving children in two trials to let them decide which playsets should be included and how to make them more playful and engaging. To our team’s delight, the museum took the children’s suggestions seriously and made adjustments to the educational playsets based on their input. We also want to emphasize the importance of honoring children’s contributions, so we made it a point to mention the children who collaborated with us at every opportunity.
The staff at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts sought Dr. Patterson's advice on exploring more possibilities for implementing Children's Museology (Photo by Chun-Hui Wang).
There are some aspects we still want to adjust, such as a renovation of the quiet room and increasing adult-child interactions in the space. We consulted with Dr. Patterson and confirmed that creating more opportunities for participation is key to improving these issues. Specifically, she encouraged us to take whatever challenges we were facing to children directly, by asking them what they think we should do to address issues like a dark and uninviting quiet room, or how they can encourage adults to play in the Art+Play space.
The idea of children’s rights is not widely recognized in Taiwanese society, and most museums do not see children as potential contributors to their exhibitions or their offerings. But through my work as an arts educator in Taiwan, I have connected with others like me who see the value and potential that children hold. Dr. Patterson’s visit made me realize that those who truly care about children are always eager to share and support each other. What we need to do is trust children wholeheartedly, seek their help in making museums better, and find our allies to make museums-and the world-a better place.
Special thanks to the Beyond Play-Making professional network (Yui-Hwa Lee, I-Hsin Chen, and Yi-Hui Hsieh), the Puppetry Art Center Taipei (Yi-Wei Tsai, Flore Liu, Elisa Lin, and Yu-Chieh Lin), the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Shu-Yun Huang, Emily Wang, Hsin-Yun Liu, Trina Huang, and Szu-Chieh), and my family. Your kindness and generosity made Dr. Patterson's trip to Taiwan even more special and meaningful.
The author, Chun-Hui Wang, at her former place of employment, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, Taiwan. (Photo by Monica Eileen Patterson).