Image Museum > Hsinchu City > Tourism Administration, Republic of China (Taiwan)

Built in 1933, the Yule Theater was the first air-conditioned theater in Taiwan. The 500-person capacity theater joined both ancient Roman and Arabian motifs to present a vision of grandeur intended to display the national power of the then occupying Japanese government.

The second floor of the theater was heavily damaged by aerial bombing in 1944. Two years later, the theater was brought under government administration and renamed the Guomin Theater. It subsequently attracted huge crowds as a movie house. It also was used for concerts and army recruitment drives. In the 1980s, the theater became involved in a property dispute between the Hsinchu county and city governments. It also suffered from declining attendance with the rise of rental videos, forcing the theater to close its doors in 1991.

The theater was reopened in 1996 to serve as the Hsinchu City venue for cultural events organized as part of a national arts festival. The reopening sparked renewed interest among locally prominent persons and movie buffs in restoring the theater. The Chinese Taipei Film Archive was commissioned to draft a plan for the establishment of an Image Museum at the theater. In 1998, the Council for Cultural Affairs provided funding for the yearlong restoration project culminating in the museum's opening on May 21, 2000.

The mission of the museum is to preserve the cultural experience of the Guomin Theater and to serve as a shared image space for city residents. In addition to promoting and showing alternative and older movies, the museum archives, displays, and researches cinema-related items and promotes cinema education.