Can a note give an ancient soul a contemporary function? How does a species of butterfly endemic to Taiwan magically combined with a human figure to give it fluttering Zen charm?

The awards ceremony for 6th TELDAP Commercial Application Competition –“So artistic” was held on March 27 at the Land Bank branch of Taiwan National Museum. Let us see how the crystallizations of creativity and culture extracted stories, context and spirit from archived cultural relics to create new products that would surely impress people from ancient times. 

The competition had three categories:the poster design, cultural and artistic design and the figurine design categories;the poster design category used archives resources as elements and had the main aim of promoting digital archives, the imaginative, original  designs giving an injection of vitality to digital archives resources. The selected work  "Deep sea fish” used a dragon fish with its mouth open wide to express the key letter “e”, symbolizing that it is possible to swim with fish even at home; the tableau full of faint ripples makes people want to explore the mysteries of the deep. The cultural and artistic category also drew on the soul of ancient cultural relics and injected a contemporary function, transplanting those cultural relics and utensils that have been left behind by the times, to modern products;the best example of this was the winning work “Paper: Bamboo strips” that utilized the form of jiandu ancient bamboo strips (used for writing on) to create notes that people just love;the user can tear off the size they need, and they can also be rolled up and used as a pen holder; leaving notes can also be very “retro.”The aim of the figurine category was to cleverly personify a creature from nature. The work that won the first prize, “Dancing Butterfly,” had a species of butterfly endemic to Taiwan as its subject and added the five elements of Chinese culture “gold, wood, water, fire and soil,”the elegant butterfly figure expressing Taiwan’s local economic, cultural and natural characteristics, presenting a profound image.

The 6th TELDAP Commercial Application Competition held by the Academic and Social Promotions and Applications of Digital Archives and e-Learning Project aimed to bring Taiwan’s archived cultural relics back to life, using creativity to create sparks between traditional and contemporary, so that archived cultural relics will no longer neglected but have a close and active connection to contemporary life.  It should really be hoped that one day these ingenious and creative works can become products and, in contemporary life, tell ancient legends and stories, inspiring and making people reflect while they are being used.