Brightness amid banality
In 2012 the CMP Group bought Shangrila Paradise, located on 40 hectares of forested foothills at elevations ranging from 50 to 100 meters. “For Taiwan, it was a rather unremarkable site.” Such was the first impression of Mai Shengwei, the park’s current chairman.
CMP initially hired an internationally renowned architecture firm, which after two years’ work came up with a concept for an international holiday resort. In the unanimous opinion of CMP’s top management, “It was glamorous, but it had little connection to local culture.” After rejecting the resort concept, they recruited a new management team from within the CMP Group and gave authority over new plans for the site to Jonas Ho, executive director of the CMP PUJEN Foundation for Arts and Culture.
To give the park a new identity, Ho sought out the Japanese architect Hiroshi Nakamura. After much discussion, Nakamura came up with three major guiding principles for the site’s future: craftsmanship, ecological sustainability, and a philosophy of life. “It sounded a little grandiose and hard to understand, but to comprehend it we needed to put it into practice!” says Ho somewhat bashfully.
Ripping out Shangrila Paradise’s trademark European-style gardens and replacing them with a lawn, Ho came up with the idea of a glamping venue. “Everywhere has lawns. Who’s going to want to come and camp here?” asked Mai Shengwei at first. Jonas Ho invited landscape artist Wang Wen-chih to design an installation that became “Bamboo Woven Sky.” With Wang leading theme park staff, they brought in more than 5000 lengths of bamboo and spent 40-some days weaving two large bamboo domes and a passageway connecting them. Named Shan Na Village in Chinese after the Hakka term for a mountain village, it was the first part of the CMP Village plan to be completed.
At CMP Village, planning department members are called “village heads,” and visitors are dubbed “villagers.” Upon entering the village, you discover a well-appointed place with distinctively designed tents, and also meet village heads who have prepared a variety of interesting projects. For instance, the “Department Store in the Hills” makes use of the park’s natural environment to create substitutes for regular consumer goods, turning pine needles into tissue paper and celery stalks into drinking straws. As you explore with a map, nature becomes a marvelous marketplace.
A machinery-based theme park loses its novelty over time. “Yet nature and culture only become more interesting as time passes,” notes Ho. “That was our logic in planning CMP Village.”
Artists turned an abandoned water tower into a starship. The fallen leaves and moss inside, along with the greenery above, give free flight to the imagination. (photo by Kent Chuang)