Hsiang-Lien Lee

4.28 Sustainable Aging and Cultural Translation: Design Actions in Participatory Art (Paper)

Hsiang-Lien Lee – Graduate School of Design, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Taiwan

Abstract:

Taiwan has entered the era of a super-aged society. This study is a collaborative effort by Hsiang-Lien Lee, a doctoral student from the Doctoral Program in Design at National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Professor Chang-Franw Lee, and Professor Chun-Hung Liu from National Taitung University. Together with elderly community members, the team explored Taiwan’s cultural memories through participatory art creation, seeking methods for cultural translation. During the planning process, the team discovered that some elderly participants retained fears rooted in early political persecution and bore scars from gender stereotypes. Through interviews and the creative process, professors, students, and elderly participants collectively extracted key elements during inclusive art workshops, transforming past memories into group art creations using artistic media. This experimental project organized ten participatory art workshops. Feedback from elderly participants, collected via well-being questionnaires, indicated improvements in psychological resilience. Meanwhile, undergraduate and graduate student participants demonstrated enhanced self-identity and team cohesion, as shown in pre-, mid-, and post-workshop surveys.