The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts will host the 9th Asian Art Biennial this November. Today, the museum unveiled the curatorial theme, introduced the first series of new works, and released the initial list of participating artists. This year's curatorial team, convened by Taiwanese independent curator Fang Yen Hsiang consists of four international curators, including Asli Seven (Turkey/France), Haeju Kim (South Korea), Merv Espina (Philippines), and Anne Davidian (Armenia/France).
The exhibition’s title, “How to Hold Your Breath,” plays on the phrase “don’t hold your breath,” which typically advises against high expectations, reversing its meaning to imply latent hope. The curatorial team draws on the Sanskrit term “kumbhaka,” a specific breath-holding technique in yoga, considered one of the oldest and simplest methods for altering mental states. Through this bodily technique of shifting consciousness, this year’s biennial aims to invite viewers to hold their breath, focus on the present moment, and recalibrate the relationship between our bodies and the rhythms of nature, thus creating space for new agency. The exhibition imagines a deep dive before facing an uncertain future.
This year’s biennial features artists from over 20 countries across East Asia, Central and West Asia, and the Pacific region, including the cultural backgrounds of those from Eurasian nations and Asian descent living globally. A total of 13 new works will be showcased, with five artist projects revealed in this announcement. These works explore historical perspectives on modern political governance and global economic trade flows in Asia, intertwining various cultural and natural imaginations, allowing audiences to experience and understand the aesthetic essence and contemporary issues of the Asia-Pacific region from different temporal and spatial dimensions.
Nathalie Muchamad, a French artist of Indonesian descent born in New Caledonia, excels in multimedia installations using images, paintings, and text archives to explore multiple concepts between geography and history. Her new work, Production Notes: Breadfruit, Mutiny, Planetarity, focuses on the relationship between the history of global trade goods and European overseas colonization within the context of the Plantationocene. She analyzes the 18th-century HMS Bounty mutiny during its mission to transport breadfruit to the Tahiti Islands through woven and printed representations in films and paintings.
From Afro-Asia banquets, installation, and reggae soundtracks as creative ways of remixing global intimacies, sedimentation, and fermentation, Tao Leigh Goffe has long been interested in crosscurrents amid colonial entanglements. Exploring island and geological intimacies that draw on her Black British and Jamaican Chinese heritage, Goffe’s new two-channel video installation Black Pacific, Chinese Atlantic is an assemblage of found and archival footage that centers on a journey of Afro-Chinese diaspora return. Using home movies and British historical documents, Goffe revisits her grandfather and great grandfather’s return to Hong Kong and Shenzhen from Jamaica and New York in 1985. Collecting and collaging historical images to reference bourgeois intimacy and memorial, a form of tomb sweeping for Black and Asian diaspora genealogies, the new work offers an intimate look at the long history of Pacific and Atlantic encounters through commerce, remittance, and the tension of fraught family bonds across racial and national lines.
The exhibition addresses urgent regional political, social, and cultural conflicts, while also offering new perspectives on redefining the relationship between humans, nature, and the non-human world. Taiwanese artist Wang Yu-Song’s new work, Microbial Studies, shifts the perspective to invisible soil microorganisms, the most diverse and widespread organisms on Earth. Through various media, the artist presents the dynamic energy of these continuously changing microorganisms, allowing the audience to experience the invisible yet real life forms.
Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova’s new version of the film Arslanbob captures the unique primary walnut forests of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia. A cinematic hallucination, the film conjures the entrancing presence of the millennial trees, vernacular tales of mind-altering experiences induced by mysterious substances inhaled under their shadows, and mystical quests seeking refuge in their dense entanglements
Malaysian artist Sharon Chin’s participatory artwork, Portal, focuses on two mangrove trees facing each other in the coastal town of Port Dickson. The artist uses the perspective frame created by these twin-like trees to connect various landscapes, including offshore oil platforms, marine life around the roots, and the deteriorating beach environment, exploring what it means to love a place in a time of planetary crisis, witnessing both its vitality and decline.
“How to Hold Your Breath—2024 Asian Art Biennial” will be on view from November 16, 2024, to March 2, 2025. The exhibition includes contemporary artworks from various Asia-Pacific countries, encompassing installations, paintings, sculptures, videos, and documents. The exhibition will offer diverse activities such as research forums, experimental performances, participatory workshops, and artist talks. For more information, please follow the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and the Asian Art Biennial’s social media pages.
2024 Asian Art Biennial
Exhibition Period: November 16, 2024, to March 02, 2025
National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts(NTMoFA)
Website: https://www.ntmofa.gov.tw/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/ntmofa/
LINE：https://lin.ee/dApAqLs
Opening Hours:
Tue – Fri: 09:00~17:00
Sat – Sun: 09:00~18:00 (Closed on Monday)
Address: No. 2, Sec. 1, Wuquan W. Rd., West Dist., Taichung City 403414, Taiwan (R.O.C.)
TEL: + 886 4-2372-3552
Initial Artist List
Noor Abed
Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research（AFSAR）
Khyam Allami
Marwa Arsanios
Andrius Arutiunian
Sharon Chin
Chu Hao Pei
Fang Wei-Wen
Tao Leigh Goffe
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
Emre Hüner
Saodat Ismailova
Maiko Jinushi
Cetus Kuo Chin-Yun
Woosung Lee
Milay Mavaliw
Nathalie Muchamad
Hwayeon Nam
Pak Sheung Chuen
Nefeli Papadimouli
Natalia Papaeva
Ri
Kirill Savchenkov
Yehwan Song
Trương Quế Chi & Nguyễn Phương Linh
Wang Yu-Song
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Jasmin Werner
Nil Yalter
Yoshinori Niwa
Gary Zhexi Zhang
Artist Profiles for Initial New Works
1.Nathalie Muchamad, |
bio | Born in New Caledonia - Pacific Ocean and now based in Mayotte, Nathalie Muchamad’s work revolves around videos, drawings, texts, installations, taking into account a geography and its history by exploring the notion of multiplicity. By excavating her origins both from Java, Indonesia and Oceania from New Caledonia/Kanaky she questions the idea of an identity deconstructed through the quest for history. Focusing on the motif and the archive that she reappropriates, Nathalie Muchamad explores the role of trade and commodity in colonialism, proposes research on the history of spices and plants in a Plantationocene context where the conditions of establishment of the populations of European overseas territories are linked to the spice and plant trade. Her work has been previously featured in the “Kochi-Muziris Biennale” (2022-23), “17th Istanbul Biennial” as part of the “Disobedience Archive” (2022) and “Taipei Biennale” (2020). |
2 . Tao Leigh Goffe |
bio | Born in the metropole of the British Empire in the United Kingdom, Tao Leigh Goffe’s work engages with questions of monarchy, sovereignty, power, and coloniality. Raised between London and Queens, New York, she considers island ecologies and the unfolding relationship of the sea and the shore. She is invested in the temporal play of remixing, sculpting, and manipulating sound, creating videos, sound sculptures, and installations that foreground digital tools as a way of critiquing overlapping European colonialisms by creating sonic kinship through Black music technologies. Combining sound and new media technologies to examine how metadata and other taxonomies function as colonial sorting tools, her interdisciplinary practice is shaped by DJing and what it means to mix and layer sound to form a new narrative. She is a member of the Creative Science track of NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art and technology in New York City. She studied at Princeton University before earning her PhD at Yale University. She is also an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. On the campus, Tao runs Afro-Asia Group, an organization committed to building intellectual communities beyond institutions. A network of theoreticians and technicians, the lab centres futurity and radical coalition-building towards sovereignty and the blueprint of Bandung. |
3. Wang Yu-Song |
bio | Born in Hualien in 1994, currently lives and works in Hualien. A mixed-media artist, he aims at exploring various possibilities of creation in everyday lives through lived experience and personal observations. His recent works focus on the “past” that has existed, the “now” that is happening, and the “future” that may take place. Wang likes to explore the ambiguous zone between fiction and reality through his own living environment, lived experience, and to a greater extent, social consciousness and relationships in groups. Through objects, images or particular spatial configurations, his works invite the viewers to open up all their senses and read and interpret the works with their own imagination. |
4. Saodat Ismailova |
bio | Born in Uzbekistan, lives in Paris. Saodat Ismailova’s films encompass themes of memory, spirituality, immortality, and extinction. One of the most important voices coming from Central Asia, Ismailova’s works have been featured at “Documenta fifteen”, “Venice Biennale” 2022, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2023), Berlin; “Sharjah Biennial” (2023) |
5. Sharon Chin |
bio | Sharon Chin (b. 1980, Petaling Jaya) is an artist living in Port Dickson, Malaysia. Her work includes printmaking, illustration, installation and collaborative performance projects, and has been shown in Malaysia and around the world. She participated in the “Singapore Biennale” (2013, 2019) and the “Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art” (Brisbane, 2015). Her work is in the permanent collections of Singapore Art Museum and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. She is a current recipient of the Prince Claus Mentorship Award for Cultural and Artistic Responses to the Environmental Crisis (CAREC), as well as the British Council Connections Through Culture Grant. Recently, she has been concerned with healing the relationship between humans, land and place, focusing on the intersection of art, ecology and community organizing in Port Dickson. |