Art

Nov 11, 2025 3:57PM

Álvaro Urbano, *TABLEAU VIVANT (A Stolen Sun), *2024/2025. Courtesy of the artist, ChertLüdde, Travesía Cuatro, and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo by Lu Guo-Way. Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum

When Sichuan-born painter Shiy De-Jinn arrived in Taiwan, he fell in love with the men and the mountains. Having fled China with the nationalist Kuomintang army in the aftermath of the civil war, his wistful paintings depict both the island’s lush horizons and the luminous muscles of its young men. In the decades since his death, his work has found a place in the canon of Taiwanese art history, representing a newly reconfigured nation reaching toward a vision to anchor its fluid identity, as well as the irrepressible resilience of queer desire. His work is on view as part of the Taipei Biennial 2025, which is titled “Whispers on the Horizon.” Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, who co-direct Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum, the event is a sprawling rumination on the experience of yearning.

On the surface, “Whispers on the Horizon” often feels as though it splits neatly down the line between these two flavors of yearning: the yearning of the body—to feel, to touch, to gather with other bodies, and the yearning of the spirit—to grow, to know, and to assert oneself. However, the most interesting works in the exhibition, like Shiy’s, explore where these wants collide and overlap, complicating and revealing one another in the process. Assembling a roster of 72 artists from 37 cities and presenting 34 new commissions alongside a carefully curated survey of historical Taiwanese artworks (plucked from the Taipei Fine Arts Museum—TFAM—archives), the Biennial paints its vision of yearning with broad and romantic strokes.

At times, this gesture comes to mirror the way that competing desires can jostle clumsily with one another. Wildly varied experiences of trauma and struggle, from across history and across the globe, are represented here. Is “yearning” really a precise enough concept to delicately approach the parallels and frictions that exist between them? It does, however, offer a sensual exploration of the poetry at the heart of the big feeling that grounds it. The show generously and eagerly experiments with the language of yearning—fumbling playfully around to hunt down all of its possibilities.

Here are five artists to pay attention to at the Taipei Biennial 2025.

Omar Mismar

B. 1986, Taanayel, Lebanon. Lives and works in Beirut

Omar Mismar,* Still My Eyes Water*, 2025 at the Taipei Biennial 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Welcoming visitors at the entrance of the biennial’s first floor is a towering spray of flowers. Pieced together out of fabric by Lebanese artist Omar Mismar, the oversized bouquet calls to mind the wreaths that fill the streets of Taipei in celebration of newly opened businesses, or perhaps the flowers flanking the coffin at a funeral. Here, either association could be apt—Still My Eyes Water (2025) evokes both grief for the past and hope for the future.

Each of the 54 varieties of artificial flowers is taken from “Flowers of Palestine” (1870), a book illustrated by 19th-century Swiss missionary Hannah Zeller. The diverse bunch is a clash of rich reds, pinks, and purples—even a prickly cactus nestles among the petals. Mismar aims to reflect on the duality of that country—a place overflowing with precious human and nonhuman life that has been subject to unbearable violence in recent years. The artist is known for his tender reflections on the toll of war, creating portraits that question how we view the subjects of conflict. Here, he rails against the possibility of this wealth of life being found only in history books such as Zeller’s as the region is eroded by occupation. His project lifts these flowers out of the colonial archives and drags them back into the world. It is a gesture that brilliantly demonstrates Bardaouil and Fellrath’s assertion about yearning—that it is not just a nostalgia for the past, but also a want for the future.

Wu Chia Yun

B. 1988, Yilan, Taiwan. Lives and works in New York

Wu Chia Yun, No Home to Land, 2025 at t Taipei Biennial 2025. Courtesy of the Artist.

Wu Chia Yun’s work resonates powerfully with the selection of historic photographs the curators have scattered throughout the exhibition. Indeed, many of the works by Taiwanese artists included in the exhibition are prints pulled from TFAM’s archive. Many of their photographers are long dead. Snapshots by early Taiwanese photographers such as Li Dyao-Lwun (1909–1992) and Syu Ching-Pwo (1930–2021) provide flashes of the layered and complex history of the island. They also root the theme of yearning in the local context with glimpses at moments of quiet struggle towards new ways of living. Of the living Taiwanese artists represented here, the majority also turned towards the past. Yun’s installation of photography and sculpture draws from Qing dynasty–style rock gardens, recreated in Taiwan by early migrants from Southern China as a thread that connected them to home and history.

In the center of her small presentation at the Biennial, Yun (who has a background in set design) recalls these gardens with a mound of craggy stones, loosely obscured by black sheets as if in mourning. The sculpture—No Home to Land (2025)—touches on the questions of identity and sovereignty that loom over the island indirectly. As with the selection of photographs, here she excavates instances of fraught identity from Taiwan’s past, locating a unified sense of national self in the feelings that emerge consistently throughout the island’s storied history. Presented opposite are excerpts from a larger series of photographs that offer a similarly melancholy meditation on themes of Taiwanese identity. A Song for Loss II-II (2015) shows a small sand castle on the edge of the shore. The word “country” is scratched out on the photograph’s surface, a cloud of white clay appearing to creep across the scene like a cataract. It is a direct and anguished cry against the deprivation of recognition.

Yeesookyung

B. 1963, Seoul. Lives and works in Seoul

Yeesookyung, Translated Vase_When Will I See You Again_2025, 2025. Photo by Lu Guo-Way. Courtesy of the artist and of Taipei Fine Arts Museum,.

Despite the focus on yearning and identity, the exhibition treads lightly around Taiwan’s contemporary relationship with China. One of the places where it does inevitably invite reflection on the deeply complicated issue is in a handful of works that take inspiration from Taipei’s National Palace Museum (NPM)—the Taiwanese institution that houses many prominent treasures of Chinese antiquity. Korean artist Yeesookyung presents a newly commissioned sculpture in her “Translated Vases” series. The ongoing project involves retrieving fragments of vessels rejected by master ceramists and reassembling them into abstract forms by filling the cracks with 24-karat gold. Translated Vase_When Will I See You Again_2025 (2025) is informed by a work of pottery in the NPM collection, itself a replica, depicting a woman on horseback.

Yeesookyung’s copy of a copy is a heaving, mutated take on its reference. Swelling far beyond the knee-high proportions of the original, this new work towers over the heads of most visitors. It bleeds gold from the places where broken pots have been fused together, oozing harsh electric light from a lantern hidden within. On the rear side of the sculpture, which is placed in the center of the room, the viewer will find unfinished edges and a wooden scaffold that supports its glossy facade. The work speaks to the distance that can open between and within cultures and the impossibility of replication. It attests to both the weight of the transformations that can take place within that divide and the reparative possibilities of attempting to reconcile old with new.

Skyler Chen

B. 1982, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan. Lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands

Skyler Chen, Finally, My Banquet on the Street, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

In Taiwanese painter Skyler Chen’s work *Finally, My Banquet on the Street *(2025), a pensive young man, his hair perfectly laid, sits at the head of a red rechao table—a style of Taiwanese dining where friends and family gather with small plates and drinks. Above the table we see dumplings, family photos, Taiwan Beer; below, an unseen figure clutches a sexy magazine. The large canvas hangs with pride of place in Chen’s extensive selection of work at the Biennial, clearly illustrating the tension his work identifies between the public and private self in Taiwanese society. It’s an appropriate centerpiece for what feels like a homecoming of sorts for the Rotterdam-based artist. Finally, his banquet.

Chen’s work often brings together subtly surreal tableaus that weave biographical snippets into his study of queer identity and generational trauma on the island. The result is scenes that look like how a queer Taiwanese kid might imagine his life, all grown up. In Favourite Novel (2022), another unseen figure reads an erotic novel at a tastefully laid dinner table—a vase of fresh-cut orchids in the foreground, and a big black butt plug in the back. Simultaneously vulnerable and cheeky, Chen’s canvases embrace the contradictions of finding one’s modern identity among layers of familial history.

Fuyuhiko Takata

B. 1987, Hiroshima, Japan. Lives and works in Chiba, Japan

Fuyuhiko Takata, *The Princess and the Magic Birds, *2021/2025 ©Fuyuhiko TAKATA. Photo by Lu Guo-Way. Courtesy of the artist and WAITINGROOM. Image courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Though the Biennial’s overall exploration of yearning is varied and expansive, it doesn’t shy away from more carnal notes and the impulses rooted in desire. After all, Bardaouil and Fellrath chose to present one of Shiy De-Jinn’s most lecherous portraits over his prized landscapes. One of the most aggressively horny inclusions is Japanese artist Fuyuhiko Takata’s *The Princess and the Magic Birds *(2020–21). If visitors follow a darkened pathway into the installation, they arrive at a huge plush mattress, where they can recline and watch two birds whisper gratuitous nothings into the ear of a sleeping adolescent boy.

In the dreamlike film, the birds—puppeteered by the artist himself—fill the boy’s head with the fantastical exploits of the relentlessly aroused princess of a far-off land. We eavesdrop on his not-yet-wet dream, as the princess makes her way from one sweaty, stinking roll in the hay to the next. Stuffing hairy orifices with precious gems, and destroying mirrors so her boys will never learn of their own beauty, hers is an audacious and uncanny romp that speaks to the subversion that nests at the heart of truly queer desire. This is a princess who, as the narrative progresses, defies the expectations of her gender and station, neglecting her nation all in the pursuit of a good time. (Listen, we’ve all been there.) The work is the most visceral in the show, and incredibly effective—a potent reminder of what it can mean to feel a pang of yearning deep in one’s bones.

Christopher Whitfield