9th Taiwan Art Biennial: Black Water

The 9th Taiwan Art Biennial, titled Black Water, opened on November 15, 2025, at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and runs through March 1, 2026. Curated by Jay Chun-Chieh LAI, Associate Curator in the Exhibitions Department of the museum, the exhibition presents 37 works by 31 artists and groups. Eight works are newly commissioned, while the remaining exhibited pieces have previously received recognition at international film festivals, film awards, and art festivals. 

As the theme of this year’s Taiwan Biennial, Black Water evokes imagery of darkness and submersion, serving as a metaphor for the terrifying experiences of migration, diaspora, and multiple colonialisms in Taiwan’s history. The title draws inspiration from decolonial theorist Walter D. Mignolo’s concept of the “darker side,” through which the exhibition seeks to explore the long-neglected or obscured issues within the narrative of Taiwan’s art history.

As the curator Jay Chun-Chieh LAI has noted, facing Taiwan’s history and its people, the word “black” instinctively evokes the “Black Ditch” (a perilous stretch of the Taiwan Strait long regarded as an extremely dangerous crossing due to its deep-sea topography and powerful converging currents, symbolizing the mortal risks and unknown fears associated with transoceanic migration) and the legends and stories associated with it. Temporally, it extends to the colonial history of maritime imperial expansion; spatially, it symbolizes the global framework of modern capitalist circulation. The “Black Ditch” thus becomes an imagined spiritual barrier, delineating a historical divide between Taiwan and the world—particularly with mainland China across the strait. 

The color black also alludes to the long-standing discrimination and oppression of Indigenous peoples and local communities under settler colonialism. At the same time, it echoes the historical shadow of the “White Terror,” touching upon sensations and emotions of fear, pain, oblivion, and subtle unease. Conversely, “water” serves as a crucial image and metaphor of movement and transformation, inviting us to view Taiwan from an archipelagic perspective and through the lens of fluidity, while also reminding us that historical memory is never indestructible; it can be washed away, misperceived, or even forgotten. Taiwan, this expanse of water, intertwined with the world’s collective sorrows and anxieties, is both the harbor of those who arrive and the hidden passage of those who depart; it is at once a conduit of trade and colonization, and a site of violence and memory. The image of Black Water help us envision the possibility of rewriting history: not as a singular and universal history, but with the understanding that the writing of history must be maintained in a constant state of dynamic reflection, continually confronting the many unfinished stories that remain obscured or hidden. 

Highlights of the 9th Taiwan Art Biennial include the following newly commissioned works:

Li-chung Lee’s The Diary 11 of Pontanus – Middag is a performative installation that draws on the perspective of Pontanus, a seventeenth-century employee of the Dutch East India Company, and employs a quasi-chorographical approach to narrate and examine his journey through Formosa, accompanied by an imperial ghost in an exotic foreign land. 

TzuMei Li’s Dead Language, Living Vibration: The Web of Exchange is a sound installation that seeks to recover possibly lost elements of the Basay language. Using the relationship between sulfur and volcanic landscapes as a point of departure, the work attempts to rearticulate the spectral echoes of colonial history. 

Jun-honn Kao’s Vision of Near Death Experience is a video installation that approaches history from the perspective of “visions of near-death,” examining the massacre in the mountainous area of Kaohsiung during the Japanese colonial period, and exploring the irreproducible visual and sensory experiences of those on the brink of death amid war and catastrophe.

Fei-hao Chen’s Is It a Dream? is a video documentary constructs a fictional narrative in which Japanese writer Mitsuru Nishikawa is reincarnated as a young girl from Hirado. Through this premise, the work explores hybrid cultural landscapes between Taiwan and Japan, encompassing Dutch cultural legacy, goddess worship, and legends of the Zheng dynasty. 

Pei-chi Kuo’s AI-generated spatial installation, Pink Warship II: Sunken World, extends the afterlife of a decommissioned and dismantled warship. Within the work, the artist’s family memories intertwine with collective memory, reimagining a transgenerational narrative of subjectivity.

Chung-hsuan Lan’s conceptual installation Deviation is composed of two lookout posts set several meters apart. Viewers are invited to write messages on paper, fold them into paper airplanes, and throw them from one side toward the almost-unreachable opposite side, evoking a contemporary world shaped by prolonged conflict, divided borders, and ruptured cognition. 

Pailang Museum (Wu Chi-yu & Zian Chen) presents Pailang: Reading Room, the reading space and meeting point commissioned by the exhibition, inviting audiences to reflect on stories that have been silenced within colonial narratives.

Chih-chung Chang’s Undercurrent reveals the background of the artist’s maternal grandfather, who died young and thus never entered familial memory, originating from Gangzi, Penghu. It also traces the loss of language and cultural subjectivity and a life time of voiceless-ness of his maternal grandmother, who came from a Hakka farming family in Guanyin, Taoyuan, and married into her husband’s family as a “secondary wife.”

Dark Water is divided into three subthemes: “Arrival”, “Settlement” and “Arrival-Becoming”. There are no absolute hierarchies or chronological boundaries between “Arrival” and “Settlement;” rather, they resemble a cyclical and transformative process of subject formation, epistemologically speaking. This mountainous, ocean-encircled island of Taiwan is permeated by the life experiences of diverse identities, including Austronesian Indigenous peoples, the descendants of settler-colonial migrants, generations born under colonial rule, and contemporary immigrant communities. How does the “Arrival” found in history, upon encountering “Settlement,” transform into the “Arrival-Becoming” that is yet to come? How is identity shaped through migration? And how is history written, recorded, and affirmed amid the intertwining of fear and forgetting? Using “decolonization” as the pathway of thinking, the 2025 Taiwan Art Biennial seeks new perspectives for writing Taiwan’s art history and attempts, from the vantage points of geopolitics and local experience, to gradually articulate contemporary Taiwan’s global positioning.

For more information about the exhibition, please stay tuned to the NTMoFA official website and its Facebook and Instagram pages.