多納藝術有限公司

The location is near Linjiang Night Market and Wuxing Street, with quite a few lunch options nearby.

A gallery that considers itself to be complying with the Labor Standards Act. The owner has two companies, and employees have to share an office. Both are essentially one-person companies, with no partners or shareholders’ meetings. The drawbacks are listed below:

1. Disrespect for professionalism: The owner always thinks he can do everything. Whether dealing with artists, clients, employees, or industry peers, whenever asked to explain something, he starts rambling about a lot of irrelevant matters, while also revealing that he wants to make money from you and stating that he is not part of the art world.

2. Extremely concerned with saving face: The owner is never able to admit that his decisions have failed. Even when discussing opinions in meetings, he blames the employees for the shortcomings. He essentially suffers from paranoid delusions.

3. Falsely open-minded: The owner creates the illusion that the company is friendly toward employees and that management follows a relatively flat organizational structure, but in reality, he simply wants to retain power. The idea is that he is the company’s only supervisor (subordinate supervisors: “What am I, some kind of idiot?”).

4. Miserly and greedy: The owner claims that every dollar the company earns is entirely due to his own efforts. Profit sharing from exhibitions can be said to be among the lowest in the industry, with bonuses of less than one percent—which must also be divided among all employees.

5. Useless meetings: The owner says that he values efficiency and consolidating work progress, but in practice, he just scrolls on his phone. Any subsequent decisions have nothing to do with the previous meeting, making the supposed process of consolidating opinions completely meaningless.

6. Exploiting interns: In short, the company likes using free labor. It believes that signing an agreement with a school helps students who need credits, yet it repeatedly asks interns to do work unrelated to their internships, such as running the store without pay.

7. Making grandiose promises: The company seriously overestimates its capabilities. It cannot even handle its existing business properly, yet it often takes on work unrelated to running a gallery. When employees point out that the workload is beyond their capacity, the response is actually that hiring new employees or part-timers will solve the problem. The company also completely assumes that these newcomers will be able to get started without any training.

8. Going back on its word: The owner often objects to policies or decisions from the past, even though they were in fact decisions made by the company’s upper management itself.

9. Pay is not commensurate with the job duties: Employees are required to take over projects or management positions while receiving entry-level salaries. They are not even considered entitled to year-end or spring banquets.

10. No customer management whatsoever: The company has no understanding of customer management. It basically sells only to new customers. Raising this issue with the company may lead to suspicions that you are trying to steal sensitive data, or dismissal with the claim that employees simply do not know how to sell.

11. Absurd gallery positioning: The company treats artworks as tangible commodities, completely disregarding the concepts and forms of the works themselves, and believes that as many pieces as possible should be crammed in. Derivative products and artworks cannot be distinguished from each other, so the company has been jokingly called a general store by people in the industry—and it is still smugly proud of that.

12. No central vision: The company has no understanding whatsoever of the context of art history, lacks planning for future development, and selects artists based on whoever happens to catch its eye. It also requires represented artists to create custom works for clients, yet cannot keep within proper boundaries, repeatedly taking liberties and angering the artists.

13. Lacking ability but still trying to plant a flag across fields: The company operates a shop in a cultural and creative park with almost no days off throughout the year, frequently crossing the red lines of the Labor Standards Act. It even brazenly claims that working on public holidays does not have to be paid at double time and does not count as overtime.

In Taiwan’s arts and cultural sector, it is common to handle multiple roles while receiving low pay, and the situation is especially severe in the gallery business. This company takes all of that to the extreme. If you encounter a gallery owner who claims to have “jumping thoughts,” run as fast as you can 😇