The Taipei Biennial is the institution that has had to make, and remake, the argument that a Taiwanese contemporary art museum can host an international biennial on its own curatorial terms — under political conditions that have never permitted that argument to be made casually.
The Taipei Biennial began in 1996 as a domestic survey — the inaugural Taipei Biennial: The Quest for Identity, organised by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) as the institutional answer to the question of what a Taiwanese contemporary art museum, established in 1983 as the first dedicated contemporary art museum in the country, should make of the biennial form that had become, in the post-1980 international curatorial conversation, the principal vehicle through which contemporary art institutions argued their position in the world. The 1996 edition, organised under TFAM director Chang Chen-yu with six Taiwanese artists and scholars invited to curate sections, presented a domestic survey of Taiwanese contemporary art — a useful first move, but not yet the institutional argument the biennial would come to make. That argument arrived two years later.
The 1998 edition, Site of Desire, was curated by the Japanese curator Fumio Nanjo and is the founding international edition of the Taipei Biennial as we now recognise it. Nanjo was, in 1998, among the most internationally visible curators working in East Asia — he would go on to direct the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo from 2006 to 2019 (after serving as deputy director from its 2003 opening) — and his appointment by TFAM was a deliberate institutional move: an explicit statement that the Taipei Biennial would not be a Taiwanese curatorial survey of Taiwanese art for a Taiwanese audience, but an internationally-curated biennial whose curatorial argument would be made from Taipei into the wider East Asian and global contemporary art conversation. Site of Desire presented thirty-six artists from across East and Southeast Asia and established the institutional template that all subsequent editions would, with significant variation, work within: a foreign or internationally-resident curator, often working with a local Taiwanese counterpart, presenting a thematically-organised international exhibition that put Taiwanese contemporary art into direct conversation with the international biennial form.
The editions of the 2000s extended the institutional argument under successive curatorial pairings: Manray Hsu and Jérôme Sans for the 2000 The Sky is the Limit; Bartomeu Marí and Fumio Nanjo for 2002; Barbara Vanderlinden and Amy Cheng for 2004; Dan Cameron for 2006; Vasıf Kortun and Manray Hsu for 2008. The continuing pattern — internationally-active curator paired with a Taiwanese curator working from inside TFAM — became the institutional method through which the biennial built its curatorial network across the post-2000 period. By the end of the 2000s, the Taipei Biennial had a continuing presence in the international biennial calendar that the early Mori Art Museum, the early UCCA in Beijing, and the early M+ in Hong Kong could not yet match: it was, for a period, the principal vehicle through which the East Asian contemporary art conversation entered the international biennial circuit on terms set from East Asia itself.
The 2010s produced the editions that have shaped the international reading of the institution. Anselm Franke's 2012 Modern Monsters / Death and Life of Fiction was a curatorial project on the post-colonial and post-Cold War politics of imagination in East Asia, working through Taiwanese and broader Sinophone material in a register that addressed the cross-strait condition without reducing the biennial to a geopolitical statement. Nicolas Bourriaud's 2014 The Great Acceleration brought the Anthropocene argument — by then becoming the dominant European curatorial frame — into Taipei in a way that registered it as a Taiwanese institutional position rather than as a borrowed European argument. Corinne Diserens's 2016 Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future, and Mali Wu and Francesco Manacorda's 2018 Post-Nature — A Museum as an Ecosystem, continued the work of putting Taiwanese contemporary art into direct conversation with the principal international curatorial frames of the period.
The 2020 edition is the institutional moment the Taipei Biennial is most likely to be remembered for in the long international curatorial conversation. You and I Don't Live on the Same Planet, curated by the French philosopher Bruno Latour with the curator Martin Guinard, was a late-Latour curatorial project — Latour died in October 2022, and the Taipei edition stands as one of his most fully-realised curatorial collaborations. The exhibition organised contemporary art around Latour's framework of incompatible "planets" — Planet Globalisation, Planet Security, Planet Escape, Planet Terrestrial, and Planet with Alternative Gravity — and used Taipei as the site from which to argue that the contemporary political condition is one of populations occupying incompatible cosmological premises about what counts as the world. That this argument was made from Taipei, in the year the cross-strait political condition entered its most actively-contested post-1996 phase, is not incidental to the edition's importance. The biennial that hosted Latour's "planetary" argument is itself an institution that lives under a continuing question about which planet it is permitted to belong to.
The 13th edition, Small World (18 November 2023 – 24 March 2024), was curated by Freya Chou, Brian Kuan Wood, and Reem Shadid, and turned away from the planetary scale Latour had argued toward a deliberately reduced register — small communities, friend groups, micro-economies, modes of contraction. The reading the curatorial team offered was that the post-2020 period had been characterised by an exhaustion of the large frames within which biennial-scale exhibitions had operated for the preceding decade, and that a Taiwanese museum biennial in 2023 was well-positioned to argue the case for the small instead. The 14th Taipei Biennial is scheduled to open in late 2025 under continuing TFAM curatorial leadership, with the institutional argument that has held since 1998 still continuing to hold.
The institutional architecture
The Taipei Biennial is organised by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, a municipal institution operating under the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Taipei City Government. TFAM is not a national institution and not part of the Republic of China central government's cultural apparatus — a distinction that matters for any reading of the biennial's political conditions. The museum operates in a 1983 modernist building by the Taiwanese architect Kao Er-pan in the Zhongshan district of north Taipei, and has hosted every edition of the biennial in that building, with occasional satellite installations across the city. The 2020 Latour/Guinard edition was developed in close collaboration with French institutional partners and academic institutions; the 2023 Small World edition extended that international partnership model into a co-curatorial arrangement spanning Taipei, New York, and Sharjah. The continuing institutional question, the question that any reading of the biennial has to engage, is the cross-strait one — and that is the subject of the second-voice reading that follows.
