They create meaningful connections with local communities through innovative public programs. This biennial will delve into the complex layers of Taiwanese history, building on a foundation of exhibitions, performances, site-specific projects, and forums. It aims to illuminate the profound links between personal memories and collective consciousness, ultimately reshaping our relationship with the world through ideas shaped by sensibility.

Yearning... It’s more than desire—it’s a need that burns deep, a reaching out for something you know you’ll never truly touch. And yet, it is that very impossibility that drives us. The 2025 Taipei Biennial steps into this space, where yearning propels us into a world of endless pursuit, where what we long for may remain forever unattainable.

This land, this place—Taiwan—carries its own kind of yearning. Not bound to a singular moment or era, but woven through time like a thread running through a fabric that’s always unraveling. It’s not just the weight of the past that sits heavy here, but the dreams of a future that remain undefined. From a history of colonization to the shifting tides of identity, the people here know what it means to hold onto something that’s already fading, to keep pushing toward something that’s always just beyond the horizon. The tension between holding on and letting go. That’s where yearning lives.

In a world that spins ever faster, where borders blur and certainties dissolve, Taiwan’s story resonates with the global struggle against exclusion, reflecting a deep-seated yearning to be visible, to possess agency in a landscape scarred by historical injustices. Here, the people seem to have learned how to navigate the long shadows of the past while searching for roots that can anchor them in the hard, unyielding terrain of recognition.

Yearning doesn’t rest in icons or grand structures. It hides in the small, the everyday — the things we touch, the things we carry. For the 2025 Taipei Biennial, it all started with a puppet (Li Tien-Lu’s puppet from Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Puppetmaster), a diary (from Chen Yingzhen’s My Kid Brother Kangxiong), and a stolen bicycle (from Wu Ming-Yi’s The Stolen Bicycle). These are not just objects. They are the vessels, the keepers of memory and desire, where the personal reaches for the collective. These objects—mundane, yet laden with weight—hold the stories of those who have lived, struggled, and yearned for that which always seemed just out of reach. This is where our exploration begins. They are the prompts that opened up the world of Taipei’s 2025 Biennial.

Alongside a diverse selection of artworks from the vast holdings of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum collection, the works of the 72 contemporary artists that were gathered here, echo through us, through all of us, across time and place.

On the horizon, whispers. They do not resolve. They call.And we answer — not with resolution, but with movement.

And so we move toward the horizon, not to arrive, but to keep listening, to keep reaching, to keep living in the whisper.

The whisper lingers, fragile yet insistent.Dare we follow its voice?

The whisper lingers. We still move. We still try. We still yearn.