The Asian Art Biennial is pleased to announce the full list of participating artists for its 9th edition, taking place from 16 November 2024 to 2 March 2025 at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA). This year’s curatorial team, convened by Taiwanese independent curator Fang Yen Hsiang, includes four international curators: Armenian-born, Paris-based curator Anne Davidian; Filipino artist and researcher Merv Espina; Singapore-based South Korean curator Haeju Kim; and Istanbul- and Paris-based curator and writer Asli Seven.
Reflecting the cross-regional collaboration of its curators, this year’s Biennial brings together 35 artist groups from over 20 countries across East Asia, Central Asia, West Asia, and the Pacific. A total of 83 works will be exhibited, including 19 new commissions. The exhibition will feature a range of media, including sound, video, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation.
The title of the 2024 Asian Art Biennial, How to Hold Your Breath, evokes the tension of pausing a vital act and holding onto hope in the face of uncertainty. It flips the familiar phrase “don’t hold your breath,” suggesting that change, though slow, is possible. Taking a deep breath and holding it anchors us in the present moment, navigating the disarray of late capitalism and displacement. It is a movement of transformation, a space to listen to what is rendered inaudible and to reconnect with the somatic and circadian rhythms.
The works invite us to withdraw from systems of violence and visibility, making space for new forms of agency. Through diverse media, the artists disrupt linear time, revealing histories tied to people and places, while tracing colonial and imperial entanglements. By engaging with altered states—meditation, sleep, dreams—these works propose new ways of imagining futures rooted in relationality, reciprocity, and hope.
The screening program of the Biennial entitled How Breath Moves imagines breath as a collective cinematic device, a shared source of life and rhythm, moving across our bodies to techniques of light and projection, to explore the circulation of images, sounds, memory, and collective storytelling. The eight films engage with strategies of survival and creativity against the enduring legacies of colonialism. They celebrate the migration and translation of cultural forms through food and music; and reveal the uplifting powers of anger and love amid grief and loss.
The 2024 Asian Art Biennial opens with a two-day public program featuring artist talks, performances, and moments of reflection. Addressing themes of displacement, speculative futures, and reimagined rituals, artists invite audiences to explore layered realities and envision new forms of collective existence.
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