The 14th edition of the Taipei Biennial, Whispers on the Horizon, opens on November 1 at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath (Directors of Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin), the exhibition brings together about 150 works by 72 artists from 37 cities, featuring 34 new commissions and site-specific installations spanning painting, sculpture, film, photography, and performance.
Whispers on the Horizon explores yearning as an enduring human drive that reaches beyond the possible, speaking of the future through quiet insistence rather than proclamation. Its conceptual framework centers on three modest yet charged objects drawn from Taiwan’s literary and cinematic works — absent from the galleries but shaping the exhibition’s emotional and temporal arc. The puppet from Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Puppetmaster (1993) embodies perseverance through eras of occupation and renewal; the diary in Chen Yingzhen’s My Kid Brother Kangxiong (1960) captures a generation’s struggle between conviction and disillusion; and the bicycle in Wu Ming-Yi’s The Stolen Bicycle (2015) evokes loss, inheritance, and belonging. Together, they form an invisible architecture for the Biennial: the puppet as continuity, the diary as interiority, and the bicycle as pursuit — three intertwined expressions of yearning.
The Biennial weaves contemporary works with around 30 pieces from the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s collection. In dialogue with the new art, these collection pieces act not as static artifacts but as living agents of yearning, bridging past and present to foster intergenerational conversation. Suspended textile partitions replace solid walls in an echo of the exhibitions themes, creating permeable thresholds and open sightlines that foster a rhythm of visibility and connection.
“We want to create a Biennial that could only exist here — one that listens to the histories, languages, and contradictions that make Taipei what it is. Our dialogue with TFAM’s collection was not an act of nostalgia but of grounding: an insistence that the local, when deeply engaged, becomes a lens for the world. In Whispers on the Horizon, yearning is that bridge — it begins in the intimacy of memory and extends into a shared horizon where the local turns universal,” said Bardaouil and Fellrath.
Exhibition Highlights
The ground floor features works devoted to craft, memory, and care as acts of survival, including Ciou Zih-Yan’s “Fake Airfield” (2025), which reconstructs a decoy airstrip from the Japanese colonial era. Also on view are “Out in the Fields” (1934) by Chen Chin, whose paintings of elegant women came to symbolize a Taiwan in search of its identity, and Afra Al Dhaheri’s “Weighted PAUSE” (2025), in which meditative looped rope arrangements invite viewers to contemplate slowness as a form of resistance.
The basement level centers on the body as both witness and vessel of transformation. Through rhythmically crushed stone and glass vessels, Ivana Bašić shapes the act of breathing into sculpture in “Passion of Pneumatics” (2020–24) and “Metanoia” (2025). A 1956 photograph by the late Syu Ching-Pwo, “Confidence,” captures two men leaning close in conversation, separating and connecting at once, while Jacky Connolly’s “The Mineral Kingdom (Dark Green)” (2025) uses dreamlike imagery to merge memory with virtual terrain, turning personal grief into digital landscapes.
On the upper level, the works trace an artistic lineage driven by the desire to perceive, interpret, and connect — collectively reimagining the world through the lens of yearning. Liu Kuo-Sung breaks from traditional ink painting to develop new abstract forms in “Floating Mountain” (1971) as Eva Jospin constructs a mirrored forest in “Ici” (2025), inspired by the classical Huang Gongwang painting “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains” (1348–50). With “Skeleton” (2025), P. Staff turns the gallery into an exploration of control and resistance, layering infrared imagery and poetic narration to examine how bodies are regulated and liberated.
Li-chen Loh, Director of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, remarks: “Since its inception, the Taipei Biennial has embraced diversity of voices. This edition reflects on the ties between local experience and global context, inviting visitors to reconsider their place in an interconnected world.”
For more information, visit taipeibiennial.org/2025 or follow TFAM’s Facebook and Instagram.
