TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – The 14th Taipei Biennial, "Whispers of the Horizon," is running at Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
It is co-curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, co-directors of the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin. The exhibition features about 150 works from 72 artists across 37 cities and explores the universal drive of yearning — a profound inner desire for love, wealth, or power.
Bardaouil said the exhibition's concept was sparked by the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) painting, “Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains,” which was split between China and Taiwan for a long time. When briefly reunited, the aged scrolls no longer looked like the same painting.
This inspired the central question: Although time makes many things irreparable, why do people persist in yearning to restore the past?
The curators used the horizon as a metaphor for life's ultimate limits and death. The curators said that yearning is a common human language.
Among the key works, Haitian artist Gaelle Chovet's installation, “Fortune Cookie,” directly addresses yearning by combining cultural themes and philosophy. The cookies contain moringa seeds and hidden messages, with one holding a euro coin — a clear nod to the Taiwanese tradition of hiding a coin in New Year dumplings for luck.
Chovet said that viewers must break the cookie to reveal its contents. This physical act reflects the conflict of yearning: the tension between preserving the cookie as a memory and destroying it for the value of the euro.
The cookies were made in what the artist called an "intimate miniature factory." Chovet encourages a "creative chaos" by welcoming visitors to take the cookies, with the remaining 8,000 to be given away when the exhibition closes.
Ivana Basic’s sculpture, “I Had Seen the Centuries, and the Vast Dry Lands; I Had Reached the Nothing and the Nothing was Living and Moist,” sits on stainless steel legs and features pink alabaster, wax, and blown glass. Inspired by the mantis, the work presents a semi-mechanical form in transition, questioning the body and its ability to adapt.
Afra Al Dhaheri’s large-scale installation is shaped by the repetitive action of forming coarse ropes. The process evokes ideas of labor and production. Influenced by her upbringing in the rapidly changing United Arab Emirates, Al Dhaheri voices a collective yearning for life to slow down: “Rest is not a luxury, it is a necessity.”
Taiwanese artist Ni Hao (倪灝) explores foot fetishism and physical intimacy. His installation utilizes worn socks and private videos obtained from anonymous sellers in Taiwan’s fetish markets.
Skyler Chen (陳柏豪), also from Taiwan, addresses family, history, and identity. He merges the unspoken trauma of his family as victims of the White Terror with his queer identity, using humor and color to process the pain.
Chen's work, including a cover he designed for Bai Xianyong’s (白先勇) queer novel “Crystal Boys,” highlights the constraints of censorship. He noted that without Taiwan’s democratization, artists might "self-censor before being censored.”
The exhibition rejects traditional solid walls, instead using fabric curtains to divide spaces, creating a gentle, fluid, and translucent viewing experience.
The biennial’s concept also draws on three unexhibited literary and film references: the puppet from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s (侯孝賢) film “The Puppetmaster” (戲夢人生), the diary from Chen Yingzhen’s (陳映真) short story “My Brother Kang Xiong” (我的弟弟康雄), and the bicycle from Wu Ming-yi's (吳明益) novel “The Stolen Bicycle” (單車失竊記).
"When you deeply engage with local stories, the local becomes a lens through which to observe the world," the curators stated. "In 'Whispers of the Horizon,' yearning is that bridge — it starts in the intimacy of memory and extends to a horizon shared by the local and the universal."
The exhibition is scheduled to run until March 29, 2026.
(Taiwan News, Lyla Liu video)
