Black & White | Pier-2 Art Center — The Empty Warehouses They Shot Before the Crowds

Pier-2 plays the ordinary end of Harbour City — the streets Wu Ying-hsiung drives through on the way to Anzai's place, the part of town where informants live rather than where ministers do. The choice was shrewd, because in 2009 Pier-2 was still mostly what its name says. It began as a plain harbour warehouse district built in the mid-1970s, went quiet as container traffic moved elsewhere, and sat derelict until artists found it around the turn of the century. By the time the drama shot here it had a foothold of galleries and studios but was still, essentially, empty sheds on disused rail sidings. Rough enough to read as the wrong side of a fictional city. It has since become one of the most visited places in southern Taiwan. The warehouses run in long ranks with the old harbour rails still set in the ground between them, now filled with murals, sculpture, design shops, cafés, a live music warehouse and a near-continuous programme of markets and exhibitions. A light rail stop is named after it. Where the show found emptiness, you will find crowds. That is not a loss in the way Love Pier is a loss. The buildings are the same buildings — this is reuse rather than replacement, and the industrial bones the camera liked are all still visible under the paint. Walk to the quieter southern end, or come on a weekday morning, and the 2009 texture is still there. Open air, free to wander, individual venues have their own hours and tickets. It connects on foot to Love Pier in one direction and the ferry to Cijin in the other, which makes it the natural middle of a Kaohsiung day. A note on sourcing: the scene attribution comes from fan-compiled location guides rather than the production or the city, and the specific alleys named in those guides are worth treating as approximate. Find a stretch of rail still embedded in the concrete between two warehouses and stand on it. That is the version of this place the drama hired. Cover photo: Anav Rin, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.