A Biennale Double Bill: Taipei & Shanghai

"The show brings together contributions by seventy-two artists, including thirty-four new commissions and twenty-eight works drawn from the collection of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. As a geopolitical counterpoint for Taiwan, the biennial looks toward the former Eastern Bloc via the inclusion of works by artists from the region. Take Ivana Bašić's Metanoia, 2025, a scale model of the Tito-era Brutalist memorial Stone Flower installed in an outdoor basement gallery that looked like an air raid shelter. Her partner, writer Mikkel Rosengaard, told me that at the age of thirteen, Bašić survived the 1999 NATO bombings in Kosovo by spending months in a basement shelter, an experience that inflected the work."

"Nearby, in a rather cramped corner, Musquiqui Chihying's The Recasting, 2025, stages the biography of an imperial artifact inside a three-part, fog-lit empty vitrine. Drawing from testimonies by archivists at the Palace Museum, where the artifact is housed, the artist zeroes in on this relatively new object dating back to the Second World War: a copper cauldron, or ding, originally cast from materials seized by the occupying Japanese army in China and repatriated to Taiwan from Japan in 1951. Upon its "return" to Taiwan, the object's Japanese imperial inscriptions were recast using founding ROC president Sun Yat-sen's calligraphied words for "universal fraternity," deepening the object's unresolved postcolonial afterlives."

The biennial features contributions by seventy-two artists, including thirty-four new commissions and twenty-eight works from the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. The exhibition looks toward the former Eastern Bloc through included artists to provide geopolitical counterpoints to Taiwan. Ivana Bašić's Metanoia (2025) recreates the Tito-era Stone Flower in a basement gallery evoking an air raid shelter; Bašić's experience surviving the 1999 NATO bombings in Kosovo influenced the work. Musquiqui Chihying's The Recasting (2025) stages the biography of a copper cauldron, tracing its seizure by Japanese forces, repatriation in 1951, and recasting of inscriptions with Sun Yat-sen's words, exposing unresolved postcolonial afterlives. Curators also displayed late-twentieth-century realist photographs aligned with Taiwan's nativist literary motifs.

Read at Artforum