Date | 11.15.2025-03.01.2026
Veune | National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
Curator | Jay Chun-Chieh LAI
As the theme of this year’s Taiwan Biennial, Black Water evokes imagery of darkness and submersion, serving as a metaphor for the terrifying experiences of migration, diaspora, and multiple colonialisms in Taiwan’s history. The title draws inspiration from decolonial theorist Walter D. Mignolo’s concept of the “darker side,” through which the exhibition seeks to explore the long-neglected or obscured issues within the narrative of Taiwan’s art history.
Facing Taiwan’s history and its people, the word “black” instinctively evokes the “Black Ditch” and the legends and stories associated with it. Temporally, it extends to the colonial history of maritime imperial expansion; spatially, it symbolizes the global framework of modern capitalist circulation. The “Black Ditch” thus becomes an imagined spiritual barrier, delineating a historical divide between Taiwan and the world—particularly with mainland China across the strait.
The color black also alludes to the long-standing discrimination and oppression of Indigenous peoples and local communities under settler colonialism. At the same time, it echoes the historical shadow of the “White Terror,” touching upon sensations and emotions of fear, pain, oblivion, and subtle unease. “Black Water,” therefore, does not merely signify darkness or horror, but rather a state of obscurity and disorientation. In darkness, one cannot see the path ahead; yet within an overwhelming whiteness, one may experience such total loss that even the self becomes imperceptible. It is for this reason that “black,” rather than “dark(er)” is used in the title of this exhibition.
Conversely, “water” serves as a crucial image and metaphor of movement and transformation, inviting us to view Taiwan from an archipelagic perspective and through the lens of fluidity, while also reminding us that historical memory is never indestructible; it can be washed away, misperceived, or even forgotten. This expanse of water, intertwined with the world’s collective sorrows and anxieties, is both the harbor of those who arrive and the hidden passage of those who depart; it is at once a conduit of trade and colonization, and a site of violence and memory. These images help us envision the possibility of rewriting history: not as a singular and universal history, but with the understanding that the writing of history must be maintained in a constant state of dynamic reflection, continually confronting the many unfinished stories that remain obscured or hidden.
Dark Water is divided into three subthemes: “Arrival”, “Settlement” and “Arrival-Becoming”. There are no absolute hierarchies or chronological boundaries between “Arrival” and “Settlement;” rather, they resemble a cyclical and transformative process of subject formation. How does the “Arrival” found in history, upon encountering “Settlement,” transform into the “Arrival-Becoming” that is yet to come? How is identity shaped through migration? And how is history written, recorded, and affirmed amid the intertwining of fear and forgetting?
With these at its core, this year’s Biennial reexamines Taiwan’s historical narratives and cultural conditions from the postwar period to the present through the diverse perspectives of contemporary art. It questions the past historical view and writing framework that centered on Continentalism and regime changes, while seeking to understand contemporary Taiwan’s global positioning from the perspectives of geopolitics and local experience.
Text-National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
About Yuan Goang-Ming's work |
Everyday War (2024), a single-channel video depicting a middle-class individual’s studio apartment. In this seemingly orderly domestic scene, invisible forces suddenly intervene — walls crack, furniture topples, and the room instantaneously demolished. Moments later, everything returns to normal as if the catastrophe never occurred. This cyclical narrative blurs the boundaries between life and disaster, reality and fiction, revealing how war seeps into all corners of daily existence. Scenes of shimmering light and crumbling space alternate to evoke an absurd yet authentic tension, suggesting that the surface calm of everyday life may only mask an underlying crisis.
About So Yo Hen's work |
Hua-shan-qiang is set in a miniature house designed for the dead, and follows a self-immolated man through the afterlife. Through the video, digital works, and multi-media installation, we follow the man’s journey, which is built upon people’s imaginations of another world. Fire serves as a transmitter between the “real” world and the underworld, and also delivers the confusion of self-recognition that occurs along the way.
