November 1, 2025–March 29, 2026
In Ni Hao’s video installation Elementary School Teacher, Recess (2025), a young woman removes her white socks and wiggles her feet at the camera. From its caption, we know that she is “a 23-year-old female seller on a Taiwanese online foot fetish marketplace via Twitter”; next to the screen is a sculptural installation featuring the pair of socks Ni purchased from the seller, now stuffed and arranged to look like lovers entwined on a bed.
The work playfully embodies the metonymic logic of fetishes and the fetish economy. The foot stands in for the sexualized body, the sock stands in for the foot—but the artist loops the process of substitutions so that the socks themselves achieve their own wholeness, being transformed into autonomous actor-bodies in their own theater of intimacy. The work’s series of displaced desires make it a fitting emblem for this year’s Taipei Biennial, which explores the idea of yearning. The title chosen by curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, “Whispers on the Horizon,” provides the metaphor of a seductively beckoning yet ever-receding destination—and this affective, if occasionally illustrative exhibition seeks to take us on this journey toward a continuously deferred, unattainable goal.
Yearning, and its many possible objects and emotional textures, is examined in exhaustive detail. There is the search for spiritual transcendence in Jeremy Shaw’s black-and-white archival pictures of people in states of religious or hedonistic ecstasy (“Towards Universal Pattern Recognition,” 2016–24). Longings for community, coexisting with moments of loneliness, are revealed in the tender scenes of queer teens and young clubbers in Tobias Zielony’s snapshots of nightlife in the post-Soviet cities of Riga and Kyiv (“Golden in Riga,” 2018; “Maskirovka in Kyiv,” 2017).
The strongest works in the show take on dark, complex longings which allow desires to be expressed without necessarily being fully understood. Of Young-Jun Tak’s four choreography films on show here, which typically contain dancers’ improvisational responses to prompts, the most conceptually elegant is Wish You A Lovely Sunday (2021), in which two teams of artists, comprising a dancer and a choreographer, are tasked with creating a piece for a church and a gay club, respectively. On the day of filming, Tak surprised the dancers by switching their venues. The “holy” dance is to be performed in a grungy, neon-lit club with a huge picture of a naked man on the wall, and the “sexy” one in the opulent church with sunlight streaming through massive windows. The context-switcheroo forces the performers to find new bearings in an unexpected setting, and we see in real time how they negotiate between rehearsed and improvised, sacred and sexual, resulting in tentative, awkward-yet-beautiful physical languages that both complicate and bridge different forms of passions.
A key feature of this year’s biennial was the selection of thirty modern artworks from the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s collection that have been placed in dialogue with contemporary artworks, which in several cases served to illuminate moments of twentieth-century Taiwanese art history. Chen Chin was a prominent female painter in Japanese-occupied Taiwan who blended local subject matter with the delicate brushwork of nihonga. Out in the Fields (1934), a gouache-on-silk painting of a mother and her children in nature, shows the mother giving a child a piggyback, her gaze serene and unfocused, hands too full to receive a flower another child offers to her.
While yearning is a broad emotional category, it has its limits as a curatorial theme. In the catalog essay, the curators refer to our current reality as a “season of fracture,” with “wars and walls, algorithmic enclosures, and ecological grief.” (The elephant in the room is, of course, the tension between China and Taiwan.) The biennial responds to global divisions with images of rupture, imperfect joins, and awkward reunions, but their tones are, on the whole, wistful and elegiac. All these are appropriate responses to complex situations, but I do find myself yearning, in a show about yearning, for something more. Something less languid. Transgression, perhaps? Defiance? Despair?
At times, the works’ placid affect comes across as remote to political realities. Exploring, in an elliptical way, the issue of Taiwan-China relations is Eva Jospin’s commissioned wood-and-cardboard architectural sculpture of a city built on craggy rocks, split along horizontal lines of symmetry (Ici, 2025). The top half depicts handsome domed buildings and columns reminiscent of classical antiquity, while the second half, extending into the ground, is a mirror image of the structures on top. The wall text informs us that the work was inspired by the fate of a Yuan Dynasty landscape painting that was divided in two after a fire. One part remained in China, while the other was taken to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s. In 2011, both pieces were briefly reunited in an exhibition in Taipei. In tackling this symbolic moment after centuries of separation, Jospin’s technically impressive, apocalyptic-sci-fi-inflected work, which stresses symmetry and mirroring, feels at odds with the current tensions in cross-straits relations. The aestheticization of yearning taken too far becomes a way of sidestepping reality.
The curators propose that the biennial “offers not closure but capacity: to stay with incompletion, to move toward one another, to keep faith with the unfinished future that calls us.” Irresolution is the key word, here. The apotheosis of this approach is Spanish artist Álvaro Urbano’s TABLEAU VIVANT (A Stolen Sun) (2024/25), comprising thirteen figurative works, mostly bronze sculptures drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, and arranged in a Lynchian set of human and non-human players. The set-up includes five contorted faces on plinths, an impervious classical male nude, as well as a crab, a pear, and a single shoe whose tongue comes alive and curls up lasciviously. All of them are sitting under a lightbox ceiling that looms over the space like an incubation lamp and is timed to change temperature from a cool white to a dusky amber hue. On the ground, Urbano has scattered bronze casts of dry leaves, creating the impression of an abandoned garden.
Is this a scene from a dream, an imagined past, or a ruined future? Composed of objects liberated from their usual contexts, and carefully weighted against each other to form serene yet unusual harmonies, TABLEAU VIVANT casts its participating artifacts in a new light—which is a timeless, frictionless, parallel dimension filled with ambient calm. It is an expression of this biennial’s impossible desire—the wish to find a perfect, unimpeachable middle ground.
