The 2025 Taipei Biennial, organized by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), opens with a question central to our fractured epoch: how can we sense and imagine the world when boundaries between the artificial and organic, human and machine, are dissolving? Curated by Phong Bui, the Vietnamese-American artist, curator, and publisher of The Brooklyn Rail, this year’s edition—titled Entangled Futures—ushers audiences into a thick web of ecological, technological, and emotional interconnections that define contemporary life across Asia and beyond.
From immersive AI-generated installations to intimate performances exploring diasporic memory, the Biennial repositions Taipei as a crucible for imagining art’s role amid planetary flux. The curatorial premise takes forward the Taipei Biennial’s long-standing engagement with postcolonial and global south discourses, while highlighting East Asia’s new generation of artists negotiating data ecologies, identity politics, and the ethics of sensing technologies.
A networked ecology of practices
Unlike previous editions that emphasized geopolitical borders or anthropocenic urgencies, the 2025 edition focuses on relationality—what Bui terms “the choreography of coexistence.” The exhibition unfolds across TFAM’s multi-level gallery spaces and off-site venues across Taipei’s Datong and Zhongshan districts, creating a porous field of encounters.
Participating artists include celebrated names such as Hsu Chun-Yi (Taiwan), whose hydroponic “listening gardens” respond to environmental sound frequencies; Tomoko Yamaguchi (Japan), who collaborates with robotics engineers to stage kinetic sculptures that ‘learn’ visitor behaviors; and Lisa Reihana (New Zealand), whose video installation reframes Pacific histories through augmented mythologies.
Emerging artists from the Philippines, South Korea, and Malaysia also bring experimental practices that weave local materialities with digital speculation. Arahmaiani Feisal (Indonesia) revisits her earlier performance archives through holographic projections that question spiritual resilience in ecological collapse. Karan Shrestha (Nepal) presents a multimedia research project tracing Himalayan migration routes via blockchain-mapped oral histories.
Thematic threads: sensing, memory, and repair
Entangled Futures unfolds along three conceptual threads—Sensing Atmospheres, Mutual Infrastructures, and Repairing Time.
- Sensing Atmospheres delves into the porous exchange between bodies, networks, and environments, featuring works that visualise air quality data, speculative climatology, and bio-sonic landscapes.
- Mutual Infrastructures examines how humans and machines co-create social and emotional systems, exploring new solidarities through open-source design, urban farming, and digital craft.
- Repairing Time reflects on memory and temporality, questioning how societies might heal from technological acceleration and ecological damage.
Together, these sections weave a multi-sited encounter where visitors are invited to listen, touch, and metabolize the unseen layers of existence.
Taipei’s position in the global biennial circuit
As a biennial known for situating Taiwan within transnational cultural flows, the 2025 edition asserts the city’s identity as both a geopolitical crossroad and a laboratory of futurisms. Following the 2023 edition’s focus on “Small World” and global compression, Entangled Futures suggests a shift toward expansion—acknowledging the dense entanglement of digital infrastructures and ecological systems that shape post-pandemic art.
Alongside the main exhibition, TFAM collaborates with research institutions and community collectives across Asia to organize labs, public programs, and reading rooms. These components reflect Bui’s “social sculpture” approach—turning art into a participatory site of shared thought rather than passive spectacle.
Toward a more-than-human future
Ultimately, the 2025 Taipei Biennial foregrounds art’s potential to reimagine coexistence in a time of planetary precarity. In centering mutual intelligences—between human, machine, and nature—it extends a call for curiosity and empathy over isolation and control.
In a world increasingly divided by ideological and technological borders, Entangled Futures proposes art as a bridge—a way to sense the world anew, to feel the pulse of relation that binds the living and the artificial in one endless choreography of becoming.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
