During the past decade, Taiwan's economic and industrial growth has Taiwan's development. As a result, new infrastructure has been developed to operate museums and support new art movements. The year 2000 marked a peak of Taiwan and its installation movement, this was also supported in part by the earlier creation of the IT Park institution. IT Park, formed in 1988, is an avant garde installation and conceptual art gallery space in the heart of Taipei. Artists associated with this gallery and generation have benefited by a new economic means and political freedom to create new expression in art and also have had the opportunity to study abroad. Artists returning from foreign countries back to Taiwan, were often assisted by IT Park and had a venue to display their new works. Artworks on display at IT Park represent a mix of new media and digital installations representing broad themes and concepts.

To understand the preconditions and development of Taiwanese art, one needs to address Taiwanese history. Japanese rule of Taiwan (after the 1895 Sino-Japanese War) changed Taiwanese local art and artists stated to adopt Japanese art and Chinese art forms and themes into their own compositions. During the Mingzhi era, Japanese art adopted an interest in the portrayal of naturalistic subjects drawn and painted from real life. Between the turn of the century to 1980 the avant garde art was limited in Taiwan to the conservative constraints of what governments delivered. Only with the end of martial law did Taiwanese fine art culture mature to another level, although with the economic decline in Taiwan of recent years, the artists have become limited and some are speaking of an aggression in its development.

In learning more about Taiwan and its contemporary arts, I was fortunate enough to interview Huang Shiou-ling , a Taiwanese practicing artist with Bachelors degrees in education and commercial design from the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Huang never considered herself an artist. She created art but lacked a background in fine arts. Huang has compared herself to Hermione from the "Harry Potter" books, though not born with magical talents nor a genius, she succeeds based on her determination. Huang experiences . With a limited knowledge of western art history, she elected to study digital media as a vantage point from which to position herself in the contemporary art. To finalize her studies and interests in this new media she attended the graduate school of arts and technology at the Taiwan National University of Art.

It was in the beginning of 2001 that the Taiwan National University of Art recruited students for its new Graduate School of Arts and Technology under the supervision of Hsu Su-Ju. Now most fine arts schools and universities in Taiwan include new media art as part of their course offerings and as a direct result, digital media has become a new possibility in the production of Taiwanese contemporary art. For Huang her background in commercial design was well suited to the new computer art program at the National University of Art; likewise, her interests in the web acted as a perfect catalyst for her next studies.

Taiwanese digital art is exceptionally young and began in the 1990s in part with Professor Hsu's classes at the university. Her courses from HTML and flash scripting changed the scope of the fine arts available in Taipei particularly. Well known Taiwanese artist, Hsieh Ming-Ta, a graduate of Professor Hsu's, became known for his web art, flash games and experimental online art projects. . This legacy of web art (HTML, flash and code) from Hsu ad Hsieh laid the foundation for and strategies present in today's Taiwanese digital art. Other influential work from the 1990 included Lee Shuan-Shin's "Garden of Forking Path", Tsao Zu-Lian's "A Chinese Experimental Literary Magazine" and "Anti-Aesthetics" complied by Yao Ta-Chien. (Garden of Forking Path; A Chinese Experimental Literary Magazine ; Anti-Aesthetics).

While experimental projects were laying new foundations of how to receive art in Taiwan, the form remained unrecognized. Taiwanese artist Cheng Shu-Leain, who established her art career in New York, elevated web art in 1998 with the creation "BRANDON," however its impact had little consequence or dialogue of more artistic forms back in Taiwan. It was not until 2002 when Tseng-Yu-Chen's exhibition, "Click", exploring the relationship between virtual and real worlds, did the Taiwanese public became aware and interested in web and net art. This exhibition legitimized web art and also prompted SoiiZen Knowledge Arts Laboratory to begin to work collaboratively with digital artists from the Graduate School of Arts and Technology. In Taipei such a relationship gave artists an opportunity for work and to learn from each other and their partners. Under this umbrella of events, Huang Shiou-ling produced her "IPING" project.