The NTMoFA in Taichung hosted its 9th edition of the Asian Art Biennial, which is arguably the most important event in the Asian art calendar. Hosted from November 16, 2024, to March 2, 2025, this year’s theme, How to Hold Your Breath, seeks to capture and immerse the audience in meditative ideas of resilience and hope. More than 35 artist groups spread across 20 countries have come together to display 83 unique artworks that make audiences question their perceptions of time, place, and the future of our society.
This way, the event seeks to equip its audience with the skills to solve existing global dilemmas through unconventional art and science. The aim of this expanded article is to show that the 9th Asian Art Biennial is of great importance to the world of art by sharing the curatorial ideas of the biennale, its most compelling moments, and its impact on the future.
The Vision of the 9th Asian Art Biennial—Poetry as a New Way of Thinking About One’s Fortitude Centered on “A Phragmatic Reinterpretation Of Resilience” The tagline of the Biennale provides context for its central theme, “How to Hold Your Breath.” Essentially, the phrase seeks to counter the common expression, “Don’t hold your breath, which is more associated with exhortations to stop waiting in vain. Rather, it is an invitation to come across the world, or be still, and visualize a more powerful version of yourself. In essence, it refers to resilience, which is a brief moment or an interval in the midst of confusion and the ability to imagine new worlds in a much better way.
It echoes a lot in the context of ongoing ecological destruction, social injustices, and forced migrations. The Biennale seeks to refocus dialogical art so that we are better equipped to face the issues that humanity faces together and imagine other possibilities that are based on interdependence, exchange and optimism.
Apart from disciplinary silos, to curate, translator Yen Hsiang Fang (Taiwan), Anne Davidian (Armenia), Merv Espina (Philippines), Haeju Kim (South Korea), and Asli Seven (Turkey) have formed the core curatorial team of the biennial. This multidisciplinary team will make it possible to remove barriers of the fragmented nature and aim of the Biennale: bringing together regions and areas of differing cultures for an exchange of ideas.
The curators challenge the dominant, linear, universal ideas of time and space and contend that histories and futures are inseparable from the people, places, and contexts from which they are shaped. Their strategy combines a determination to expose under-represented perspectives and recover lost stories.
Thematic Pillars of the 9th Asian Art Biennial
1. A Blend of Styles
Among the myriad of artistic works included in the Biennial are video, photography, paintings, sculpture, sound, installation and interactive art. Out of the 83 works on view, 19 are proposed for the first time and offer a fresh insight into contemporary issues.
Major Works and Their Concepts:
• Sharon Chin’s Portal: This participatory installation examines the Anthropocene and our relation to nature. Calling for people’s attention to the environmental catastrophes going on in Port Dickson (Malaysia), this work allows the audience to light lanterns made from leftover bottles, representing perseverance and optimism in the face of environmental harm.
• Gary Zhexi Zang’s Alignments: This set of works, encompassing a number of patterns, discusses political autonomy, eternal life, and the synthesis of the past and the future.
• Marwa Arsanios’s Who Is Afraid of Ideology: This is a praxis conducted between peasants, Lebanese and Taiwanese artists, and curators that seeks to subvert ownership ideologies through ecological actions.
All these works, among others in the Biennale, push audiences to engage with a radical shift in their understanding of history, identity, and sustainability.
2. Screening Program: “How Breath Moves”
The name of the screening program seeks to capture the cycle. “How Breath Moves” was conceived as a moving image program celebrating the universality of breath and the metaphor of fleeting time. Curated around eight works of Pallavi Paul, Rojda Tugrul, and Sanaz Sohrabi, among others, it exhibits ideas around memory, movement and violence against the environment.
Contributions to the Program:
• Pallavi Paul’s How Love Moves: An extraordinary documentary that depicts the life of a graveyard keeper in India while dealing with the subjects of grief, hope, as well as the notion of soil and breathing.
• Rojda Tugrul’s A Turtle in Ten Seconds: This animated short is unique because it claims that a turtle who lived in rivers over 10,000 years ago is still alive, making the construction of dams in Mesopotamia a justified assault on the environment.
• Sanaz Sohrabi’s Breathing Archive: A unique type of an experimental film that uses archival footage along with personal memories to create a discussion about the politics of collective memory.
A number of the films provide essential backdrops for historical events that relate to the Biennial’s theme and the idea of breath and belonging, making them even more stimulating to dwell upon.
3. Interactive Public Programs
The Biennial provides its visitors more opportunities to interact through a range of artist talks, workshops, performances and panel discussions. In the opening week alone, there were events related to:
– Rewriting Time: Echoes of Other Worlds: While this panel is very self-explanatory, it focuses on the more obscure aspects of time and history.
Landscaping the Margins, Memory, and Rehabilitation: Restoration of the ecology and how memories can be utilized in the future is the main focus of this discussion.
– Sharon Chin’s Participatory Performance: In an act of collective strength, audience members were encouraged to light oil lamps as performance art.
These interventions further demonstrate the aim of the Biennial to enhance interaction and collaborations and democratize art practice for all participants.
Decompression: The 2024 Asian Art Biennial Forum
December 14, 2024, the visitors went to the Biennial Decompression Forum, a conversation concerned with themes of migration, activism, cultural memory, and solidarity between cultures and communities. Four panels and a roundtable marked the event, creating a wide scope of the forums for creative ideas and intellectual discussions.
Panel Highlights:
1. Rice and Breadfruit: An Acquired Taste of Empire This discussion engaged the politics of food systems, sustainability, and food identity, featuring artists such as Nathalie Muchamad and Chu Hao Pei.
2. Artists Pallavi Paul and Cici Wu have blurred the lines of the private and the political with their artwork that speaks of ‘migration and memory’ under their category known as ‘Breath and Belonging.’.
3. The artivist group in this panel seeks to redefine art from being just a tool of creating beautiful objects to using it as a unifying force in the fight against social injustice.
The forum ended on a moderated roundtable of the curators of the symposium and panelists, thus highlighting the ethos of the Biennial as dialogic and perceptual.
The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts: Suitably housing the event
Since its inception in 2007, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA), the largest art museum in Taiwan, has been one of the key facilitators of the Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan. The museum is situated in Taichung, and this 10-hectare site offers a good environment for modern and contemporary art.
NTMoFA’s Mission… As an art institution, NTMoFA seeks to promote comprehension of contemporary art through research, collection, and public activities. Its stress on thematic crossing of the borders in exhibitions and educational programs does not differ from the goals of the Biennial, which is to encourage the global conversation.
The Significance of the 9th Asian Art Biennial to the Global Scene
Strengthening the Asian Voice
Asian artists are brought together by the Biennial, which enables them to present their views on contemporary matters and a wide array of issues from a different perspective. Likewise, it helps to showcase artists from East Asia, Central Asia, and the Pacific, underscoring the area’s cultural diversity and shared cultures.
Tackling Profound Issues
Among the contemporary crises, the Biennial addresses issues such as climate change and colonialism. Such issues he seeks to understand in terms of their relationship to identity, memory, agency, and art.
Interactivity
Installations, lectures, and interactive performance pieces create an ever-changing relationship between the artists and the audiences, transforming the Biennial into an active debate of performance art. Such relations create a situation where art becomes a process or is stimulated by social change.
A Ray of Light and Change
The exhibition is only part of the 9th Asian Art Biennial—it is the start of a movement. The exhibition, themed “How to Hold Your Breath,” encourages the community to pause their daily routines and contemplate the principles of community, social justice, and equity. Bringing art and challenging discourse together, the Biennial seeks to demonstrate how art can change the world for the better.
Participants in the 9th Asian Art Biennial
Participating Artists:
1.Noor Abed
2.Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR)
3.Marwa Arsanios
4.Andrius Arutiunian
5.Sharon Chin
6.Chu Hao Pei
7.Kiri Dalena
8.Fang Wei-Wen
9.Tao Leigh Goffe
10.Hit Man Gurung
11.Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
12.Emre Hüner
13.Saodat Ismailova
14.Maiko Jinushi
15.Cetus Kuo Chin-Yun
16.Woosung Lee
17.Milay Mavaliw
18.Nathalie Muchamad
19.Hwayeon Nam
20.Yoshinori Niwa
21.Pak Sheung Chuen
22.Nefeli Papadimouli
23.Natalia Papaeva
24.Ri
25.Julia Sarisetiati
26.Kirill Savchenkov
27.Aziza Shadenova
28.Yehwan Song
29.Trương Quế Chi & Nguyễn Phương Linh
30.Wang Yu-Song
31.Apichatpong Weerasethakul
32.Jasmin Werner
33.Cici Wu
34.Nil Yalter
35.Gary Zhexi Zang
Artists in the Screening Program:
1.Bani Abidi
2.Noor Abuarafeh
3.Chingiz Aidarov
4.Richard Fung
5.Rojda Tugrul
6.Pallavi Paul
7.Sanaz Sohrabi
8.Your Bros. Filmmaking Group (So Yo-Hen, Tien Zong-Yuan, Liao Hsiu-Hui)
Featured image : Sharon Chin, Portal, 2024, site-specific installation with oil lamps and wheatpasted poster images, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.
