The 2025 Taipei Biennial, titled "Whispers on the Horizon," presents a powerful exploration of yearning through the works of 72 artists from 37 cities. Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, who co-direct Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof museum, this sprawling exhibition features 34 new commissions alongside carefully selected historical Taiwanese artworks from the Taipei Fine Arts Museum archives.
The exhibition draws inspiration from artists like Sichuan-born painter Shiy De-Jinn, who fled China with the nationalist Kuomintang army after the civil war and fell in love with Taiwan's landscapes and people. His wistful paintings, depicting both the island's lush horizons and the luminous forms of young men, represent Taiwan's fluid identity and the resilience of queer desire. His work exemplifies the biennial's central theme of yearning, which the curators describe as encompassing both bodily desires—to feel, touch, and connect—and spiritual aspirations—to grow, know, and assert oneself.
Lebanese artist Omar Mismar welcomes visitors with "Still My Eyes Water" (2025), a towering spray of artificial flowers crafted from fabric that greets guests at the entrance. This oversized bouquet, reminiscent of Taipei's celebratory business opening wreaths or funeral arrangements, features 54 varieties of flowers taken from "Flowers of Palestine" (1870), illustrated by 19th-century Swiss missionary Hannah Zeller. The diverse collection—rich reds, pinks, purples, and even a prickly cactus—reflects on Palestine's duality as a place overflowing with precious life yet subjected to unbearable violence. Mismar, known for his tender reflections on war's toll, lifts these flowers from colonial archives and brings them back to life, demonstrating that yearning encompasses both nostalgia for the past and hope for the future.
Taiwanese-American artist Wu Chia Yun, born in Yilan in 1988 and now working in New York, creates powerful resonance with the exhibition's historic photographs scattered throughout the venue. Her installation "No Home to Land" (2025) draws from Qing dynasty-style rock gardens, recreated in Taiwan by early migrants from Southern China as connections to their homeland. The centerpiece features craggy stones loosely obscured by black sheets, evoking mourning while touching on questions of identity and sovereignty. Her photographic series "A Song for Loss II-II" (2015) shows a small sandcastle on the shore with the word "country" scratched out, while white clay creeps across the scene like a cataract—a direct cry against the deprivation of recognition.
Korean artist Yeesookyung, born in Seoul in 1963, presents "Translated Vase_When Will I See You Again_2025" (2025), part of her ongoing series that retrieves ceramic fragments rejected by master ceramists and reassembles them with 24-karat gold. This work, inspired by pottery in the National Palace Museum collection depicting a woman on horseback, towers over visitors as a mutated copy of a copy. The sculpture bleeds gold from fusion points and oozes harsh electric light from an internal lantern, while its rear reveals unfinished edges and wooden scaffolding. The piece speaks to cultural distances, the impossibility of perfect replication, and the reparative possibilities of reconciling old with new.
Taiwanese painter Skyler Chen, born in Kaohsiung City in 1982 and now based in Rotterdam, showcases "Finally, My Banquet on the Street" (2025) as his centerpiece work. The painting depicts a pensive young man at a red rechao table—a style of Taiwanese dining where family and friends gather—surrounded by dumplings, family photos, and Taiwan Beer, while an unseen figure below clutches a magazine. Chen's subtly surreal tableaus weave biographical elements into studies of queer identity and generational trauma, creating scenes that imagine how a queer Taiwanese person might envision their adult life. His work "Favourite Novel" (2022) similarly juxtaposes intimate dining settings with erotic elements, embracing contradictions of modern identity formation among layers of family history.
Japanese artist Fuyuhiko Takata, born in Hiroshima in 1987, contributes one of the exhibition's most provocative works with "The Princess and the Magic Birds" (2020-21). Visitors follow a darkened pathway to a plush mattress where they can recline and watch two puppeteered birds whisper into a sleeping adolescent boy's ear. The dreamlike film follows the birds as they fill the boy's head with fantasies about an aroused princess from a distant land, creating an audacious narrative that subverts gender and social expectations. This visceral installation serves as a potent reminder of yearning's deep, bone-level impact and the subversion at the heart of queer desire.
The biennial's exploration of yearning proves both expansive and intimate, addressing wildly varied experiences of trauma and struggle across history and geography. While the concept of yearning might seem broad for approaching such diverse parallels and frictions, the exhibition offers a sensual exploration of the poetry underlying these profound feelings. Through its generous experimentation with yearning's language and possibilities, "Whispers on the Horizon" creates space for reflection on identity, desire, cultural memory, and the complex relationships between past and future aspirations.
