Miniature (This week's Photo Hunt theme)

When I saw the theme for this week's Photo Hunt, my thoughts leaped immediately to a certain museological establishment I visited on Christmas Day, 2007 in Taipei, Taiwan. (As an aside, I decided to visit Taiwan over Christmas that year precisely because it's one of those parts of the world in which December 25th is not a public holiday -- which thus meant that I had one fewer day where lots of stores and attractions would be shut to contend with while on vacation!)

The Miniatures Museum of Taiwan is one of those quirky private institutions that are a testament to a single individual's passion and obsession. In this case, the individual in question is a retired Taiwanese businessman by the name of Lin Wen-jen whose love for miniature art works, including items that make up whole dioramic scenes from stories such as Gulliver's Travels or locales as diverse as Venice to Japanese villages to Victorian English home interiors, led him to collecting these objects on trips to different parts of the world and, eventually, setting up exhibitions in a museological setting for others to view.

Looking at these miniature objects individually, one can't help but admire the attention paid to details and the sheer skill involved in creating these works. When taken as a whole, one's scale of admiration cannot but increase -- and in this museum, what stands out is the love as well as imagination that has gone into assembling them; this particularly with regards to those spaces that aren't meant so much to be exact miniature replicas of actual spaces but, rather, where the creators' fancies are given to really take flight.