2020 Leisure Life Festival Showing Historical Beauty of Lin Yutang House

Through a series of events for the 2020 Leisure Life Festival from March 31^th to June 30^th, the Lin Yutang House and Suki Lane are taking visitors to explore the history of the old mansion where the celebrated literatus once lived.

With traditional crafts, folk culture and daily life arts as themes, the first two events, “April Leisure in Spring” and “May Lectures in Early Summer,” present the aesthetics of late Ming Dynasty through exhibitions, seminars, and workshops hosted by the Lin Yutang House. The third event “Anecdotes in the Old Town’s Corners,” organized by Suki Lane, brings back the memories and stories scattered in the city and takes visitors to a tour of cuisines, historical relics, traditional crafts, religious practice, art galleries, and natural scenery.

The Leisure Life Festival is an idea originating from Mr. Yu-Tang Lin's love for life aesthetics in the late Ming Dynasty. Lin admired and practiced the way of life promoted by Yu Lee, a philosopher and master of life in late Ming Dynasty whose book Casual Notes of My Easy Life was deemed the Bible of life aesthetics of the East. Although Lin and Lee lived hundreds of years apart, they both were forerunners of a slow life and advocated for full enjoyment of one’s life. Lin believed modern people need spiritual relief in their busy daily life in this material world 

This year, the Lin Yutang House cooperated with Suki Lane, a cultural creative group in Dadaocheng, to organize the Leisure Life Festival with a series of activities by leading visitors to various corners of Taipei, traveling to the mountains and rivers, exploring the history of the lesser known part of the city, reading stories in the old house, and experiencing the aesthetics of late Ming Dynasty.

The Lin Yutang House was designed by Mr. Yu-Tang Lin himself and was the residence where he settled in Taiwan and spent the last ten years of his life. Based on the structural model of Chinese siheyuan, the design of the house incorporated a Spanish style and showed both modernity and classical beauty. The house serves as a multi-functional complex for exhibitions, art lectures, dining and recreation, as well as a space that promotes cultural education and established itself as the emblem of Lin's life aesthetics.

Built in 1966 at the hillside of Yangming Mountain, the Lin Yutang House has been managed by Soochow University since 2005 under the commission by the Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government. Over the past 15 years, the Lin Yutang House has been widely recognized as a successful model of university-managed museums.