The 2025 Taiwan Biennial, organized by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, is scheduled to open on Saturday, November 15 this year. This edition is curated by Lai Chun-Chieh, Associate Researcher at the Museum. Lai’s long-term research focuses on the relationship between images and text, moving images, and curatorial studies. He is particularly dedicated to uncovering the “darker sides” of art-historical writing—exploring mechanisms of rupture through themes of darkness, horror, and haunting—using curatorial and scholarly practice to write alternative narratives of Taiwan’s art history.
The theme of this edition, “Black Water,” evokes an image that is shadowy and concealed, serving as a metaphor for Taiwan’s historical experiences of migration, displacement, and multiple colonialisms. The surrounding waters of Taiwan have been both an entry point for newcomers and a spectral passageway for those who depart; both a channel for trade and colonization, and a site of violence and memory. Through the lens of contemporary art, Black Water revisits states of “arrival,” settlement, and “arrival-becoming,” questioning how identities migrate and reconstruct themselves, and how histories are reshaped amid fear and forgetting. Drawing on decolonial theorist Walter D. Mignolo’s concept and methodology of the “darker side,” the curator reconsiders postwar to contemporary historical narratives and artistic expression in Taiwan.
Wu Chia-Yun’s work Borderless Place was created in Nida, Lithuania, during the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war. For the artist, who comes from an island nation, borders are defined by the sea; yet in Nida, land is divided into nation-states. Through anthropomorphized interviews with border-dwelling creatures, the work reflects on the value of borders—constructed by human civilization—in shaping identity and nationality.
