With the Opening of the 14th Taipei Biennial, Whispers on the Horizon Takes Shape—Insights from an In-Depth Curator Interview
- Gen de Art
- Nov 14
- 6 min read
Updated: Nov 20
The 14th edition of the Taipei Biennial 2025 successfully opened on November 1, and will run until March 29, 2026. Titled Whispers on the Horizon, the biennial brings together 72 artists from 37 cities worldwide. Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, the exhibition features 34 newly commissioned works and site-specific installations that engage deeply with the museum’s unique architecture and context. The Taipei Biennial 2025 amplifies the voices of young and mid-career artists, with nearly half of the participants born after 1984.
The 14th Taipei Biennial 2025
Set against Taiwan’s layered history of colonial rule, shifting identities and political transformation, the exhibition explores the notion of yearning — stretching across time and place.
Three emblematic objects – a puppet, a diary and a bicycle – drawn from Taiwanese film, literature and history, act as metaphors for this longing. They are not physically present, but spiritually anchor the exhibition’s emotional and temporal arc.
Furthermore, contemporary works engage in dialogue with early-20th-century painting from TFAM’s collection, and with artefacts drawn from the national cultural holdings — thus weaving together a temporal span from tradition to the present.
Curatorial Interview – Key Excerpts
Q1. “Whispers on the Horizon” suggests a sense of anticipation and reflection. How did this theme emerge, and what kinds of ‘voices’ or narratives did you hope to bring forward through this edition?
A. The theme did not emerge from a single idea but from a sensation — that subtle, almost imperceptible moment when the future begins to breathe inside the present. In conversations with artists across Asia and beyond, we noticed a shared emotional register: not loud declarations, but quiet urgencies, unresolved memories, longings that refused to disappear. Whispers on the Horizon grew out of this collective register. It is a title that acknowledges that before history becomes visible, it often arrives as a murmur.We wanted to foreground voices shaped by displacement, migration, unspoken memory; voices anchored in everyday gestures and inter-generational knowledge; voices from Taiwan’s layered histories, where identity is never singular but always a negotiation. In this sense, the Biennial is not a proclamation, but an invitation to listen differently — to the almost-said, the half-remembered, the quietly insistent.
Q2. The Biennial features many new commissions and site-specific works. What role does commissioning play in shaping an exhibition’s dialogue with its host city?
A. For us, commissioning is the moment where the Biennial becomes inseparable from its place. It is how an exhibition stops being “imported” and starts becoming lived. When an artist creates something specifically for Taipei, several things happen: the city becomes material; the museum becomes a collaborator; the work becomes a conversation rather than an object. Commissioning demands risk, trust, and a certain generosity from the institution. It allows artists to push their practices into new terrain, and it allows the city — with all its contradictions, its frictions, its histories — to speak back. In Taipei, a place defined by complex temporalities and shifting horizons, commissioning is not decorative. It is the architecture through which the Biennial breathes with the city.
Q3. How do you see the Taipei Biennial’s identity evolving within the broader global biennial landscape, particularly as a site of intercultural exchange in Asia?
A. The Taipei Biennial has always had a distinctive intellectual warmth — conceptually rigorous yet deeply human, reflective without becoming opaque. What is evolving now is its role as a place where multiple cultural, linguistic, and political narratives can meet without being forced into a single storyline. But what truly sets Taipei apart — and distinguishes it from most biennials worldwide — is that it is housed within a collecting institution. This changes everything. A collecting museum offers a very different temporal horizon. Artists are not only producing works for a moment, but engaging with a lineage, a memory structure, a set of holdings that carry the city’s cultural DNA. For Whispers on the Horizon, we engaged deeply with this dimension — integrating historical objects, archives, and museum narratives into the conceptual spine of the exhibition. The result is a biennial that is not just situated in a museum, but one that is in conversation with the museum’s long-term stewardship of culture. In the global landscape — where many biennials exist as temporary platforms — Taipei offers something rare: a model where contemporary urgencies meet institutional memory, and where the new and the historical shape each other in generative ways.
Q4. In curating across so many geographies, how do you maintain a balance between local specificity and global resonance?
A. For us, the “local” and the “global” are not opposites; they are reflections of each other. Resonance happens not when themes are made universal, but when specificity is treated with depth and dignity. Our guiding principle is simple: Start with the microcosm, and the world will follow. When we work with artists from different geographies, we ask not for representations of their cultures, but for the textures of their lived experience. We look for works that carry the weight of personal truth — because that is what travels, what moves, what connects. In Taipei, this balance is especially organic. The city itself is a constellation of layered identities, languages, and temporalities. The Biennial mirrors this structure: each artist holds a specific point, but together they form a shared horizon.
Q5. From your perspective, what are some of the most surprising or moving encounters you’ve witnessed during the making of this edition?
A. What moved us most were the quiet encounters — the moments that don’t appear in press releases but shape the soul of the Biennial. For example:
An artist who traveled to a remote Taiwanese village to collaborate with elders who had never set foot inside a museum, yet whose stories carried centuries of wisdom.
A young Taiwanese filmmaker who told us that seeing one of our anchor objects — the diary from My Kid Brother Kangxiong — felt like meeting his own childhood for the first time.
An international artist who confessed that Taipei allowed them to “hear their work differently,” because the city’s emotional register is so delicately attuned to uncertainty and possibility.These encounters revealed something essential: that the Biennial is not simply an exhibition, but a series of relationships — between artists, communities, memory, and imagination. They reminded us that the most transformative moments often begin quietly, like a whisper, and end up altering the horizon entirely.
Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath Taipei Biennial 2025 "Whispers on the Horizon", 2025, installation view, image courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, photo by Lu Guo-Way.
Why This Biennial Is Unmissable
Unique new commissions on site – The exhibition features works made especially for this edition, in dialogue with Taipei and TFAM’s architectural and institutional context.
A deep temporal arc – The show spans the historical, the contemporary and the speculative future: through metaphorical objects, archival materials and newly produced works, it invites reflection on time, absence and hope.
A global-meets-local structure – With artists from many geographies, the Biennial remains rooted in Taiwan’s specificities: layered histories of colonisation, identity and migration, while reaching outward to global connections.
Engagement beyond the gallery – The curatorial concept invites listening, conversation and contemplation rather than spectacle. It offers a quieter, more porous way into contemporary art.
A platform of dialogue – As the curators note, this isn’t about imposing a single narrative but creating space for voices that often go unheard. The title Whispers on the Horizon captures that gesture: something soft, subtle, but potent.
From Left to RIght: CHEN Cheng-Po, Street Scene on a Summer Day, 1927, Oil on canvas, 79 × 98 cm, Collection of Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Skyler Chen, Finally, My Banquet on the Street, 2025, Oil on linen, 180 x 140 cm, Courtesy of the artist.
Edgar Calel, K’obomanik (Gratitude for everything that lights up and turns off before our eyes), 2025, Stones, rope, soil, ceramics, water and digital screens, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist, Mendes Wood DM, Sao Paulo; and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City, Commissioned by Taipei Biennial 2025. Image courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, photo by Lu Guo-Way.
Final Thoughts
Whispers on the Horizon positions the Taipei Biennial not simply as another large-scale art show, but as an invitation: to listen, to dwell, to feel the unspoken, and to imagine futures beyond what’s visible. The curators have crafted a show where the “whisper” is not weak but generative; where the “horizon” is not distant but imminent.For the Gen de Art reader, this Biennial offers a chance to engage with an exhibition that is both rooted in place and reaching across boundaries, and to witness how art can shape the contours of collective memory, longing, and possibility.
Dates: 1 November 2025 – 29 March 2026
Venue: Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), Taipei
Curators: Sam Bardaouil & Till Fellrath
Theme: Yearning as a collective and personal force
