From the Qing Dynasty, the Japanese-occupied period to other various colonial eras, the development of Taiwanese fine arts over the past centuries is as diverse as the multiple colonial experiences it has experienced. Whether people moved for education, work, business, emigration or war, migration, contact, fusion and conflict are inevitable when artists travel between different countries. This exhibition is titled “Painted Identity of a Homeland” and Chiayi is set to be the spatial endpoint to explore issues such as art mobility and cross-cultural communication between painters from Taiwan and China from the Japanese-occupied period to the post-war period. At the same time, it analyzes how the artwork highlights the ambiguous land identity of "hometown" and "foreign land" when time and space interact during the time while identities are blurred or overlapping, and what kind of mixed national identity is presented.

The exhibition includes two major categories: (1) Taiwanese painters from Chiayi who went to China during the Japanese colonial period, and (2) Chinese painters from various provinces who crossed the sea and settled in Taiwan after the war and worked in Chiayi. It also involves (3) A few Chinese painters who immigrated to Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period or came to Taiwan for travel and art exchange. When living in Chiayi, this “homeland” or “foreign land”; the complicated interpersonal networks are also formed between host and guest/ insider and outsider. These people were teachers and government employees, or they made efforts to creative works and promoted art education activities, making huge contributions to Chiayi. Through communication, group consciousness was formed, maintaining one's own cultural attributes or expanding ethnic connections, highlighting complex identity characteristics of different eras, generations, regions or origins, forming a phenomenon of interaction and correspondence in style and spirituality.

According to the relationship between different groups, the six subtopics are: "The Other Land of The Shore", "Transgressing the Boundaries of Time and Space", "Images of Residence", "Typical Culture", "Inherited Art of Ink Painting and Calligraphy" and “Elegant Gathering”, displayed by comparing each other through multiple viewpoints. Through the connection of cultural theories at different stages from colonial, post-colonial to trans-colonial periods, this exhibition examines the diverse aspects of the development of art in Chiayi from the Japanese-occupied period to before and after the lifting of martial law and analyzes the contemporary significance of migration, mobility and the intersection of space and time in the artworks of different groups. At the same time, under the special political situation, the exhibition expresses what kind of cultural negotiations are entangled between the nation, homeland, group self and a place, what kind of conflicts and media are used to reconcile the contradictions and differences between Taiwan, Japan, China and the West, and then finds the answer of the reconstruction of self-image and self-identity.