The Taipei Fine Arts Museum Announces the Highlights for 2025
January 2, 2025——The Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) announces the highlights for 2025, which include a research exhibition featuring the museum’s collection, two major exhibitions of world-renowned artists, six solo exhibitions by Taiwanese artists from various generations, one exhibition of contemporary images, and the year’s grand finale, the 14th Taipei Biennial. Additionally, the museum will continue to expand the potential of art with diverse programs.
Enhancing Collection Momentum, Deepening Interdisciplinary Practices and Sustainability
In the next year, TFAM will inaugurate its new collection vault, which features independently sectioned areas that ensure stable temperature and humidity levels, providing optimal conditions for storing a variety of artworks. Additionally, the vault includes restoration rooms, preparatory area, and other spaces to cater to diverse professional requirements. Alongside the hardware upgrade, TFAM will maintain its commitment to researching the collection and is set to present a memorial exhibition of Ni Chiang-Huai (1894-1943), noted as one of Taiwan’s first-generation watercolorists. Ni was the first Taiwanese student of Ishikawa Kinichiro (1871-1945), an artist known for bringing Western modern art to Taiwan. Ni embraced his mentor’s British watercolor techniques, which are distinguished by ethereal effects and elegant colors. His works earned him selection in the Taiwan Fine Arts Exhibition on three occasions. Even after taking charge of the coal mine business, he devoted his free time to painting, while financially supporting painting groups and establishing the Western Painting Research Institute to fervently promote Taiwanese art. The upcoming exhibition will feature a substantial collection of significant works and archival materials donated by the Ni family, including many valuable pieces that have never been displayed before.
TFAM has continuously supported interdisciplinary approaches and innovative art exhibitions and performances, aiming to investigate the varied potential of future artistic presentations. In the coming year, the “TFAM Net.Open” will introduce a program titled “Vanishing Acts” (working title). This project, in collaboration with Doreen A. Ríos, researcher and curator of digital art and culture, will explore the trend and phenomenon of digital and internet age. The works will challenge the notion of the internet as a static archive, instead proposing dynamic, performative engagements that dissolve as they unfold. Furthermore, Hsu Chia-Wei’s new interdisciplinary venture, The Sound of Sinking (working title), will guide the audience through a mixed reality (MR) experience, allowing multiple participants to enter the work's environment simultaneously and interact with the piece as digital avatars. The work will shift between multi-channel video installations, sound performances, and sculptures, leading to a Northbound journey transitioning between physical and virtual scenes. This year, TFAM has launched its inaugural screening space with “An Open Ending: TFAM Screening,” a series of “film festival-style” programs that feature a diverse selection of rare films and single-channel videos, including video art, short films, documentaries, animations, art films, and experimental cinema. With this inclusive approach, the program aspires to broaden the narrative scope of contemporary art images and will continue until September 2025.
In response to global environmental change and extreme weather, TFAM has explored sustainable value across multiple levels while pursuing innovative art and cultural production. The upcoming 12th “Program X-site” in 2025 has identified “material re-usability” as a key evaluation criterion. The winning project, The Pore Landscape Project by Surface Studio, incorporates recycled materials that constitute nearly a quarter of the installation’s total weight; for example, the textile material covering the installation is crafted from eco-yarn from recycled plastic bottles. Through building a large-scale experimental landscape, the project expands the museum’s plaza into a pathway that engages the audience in exploring sustainability. Once the exhibition concludes, materials weighing half of the entire exhibit can be recycled and reused post-de-installation, significantly minimizing waste and promoting a constructive cycle of architectural materials. In 2025, TFAM will continue “TFAM REUSE,” a sustainable initiative supporting eco-friendliness. Through various reuse strategies, the project will transform exhibition and promotional material scraps into artistic products and public furniture.
Two Major Solo Exhibitions of World-Renowned Artists
German artist Thomas Demand, born in Munich in 1964, is renowned for his large-scale photographs. He draws inspiration from news images or films that depict notable historical or social events. To create his works, Demand begins by meticulously recreating these scenes with paper, ensuring realistic proportions, before capturing them through careful camera angles and composition. Once the photographs are taken, he destroys all the models, retaining only the photographs to challenge perceptions of truth. His choice of paper as a medium highlights its role in conveying images and memories and its fragile nature, reflecting everyday life and the weight of history. The exhibition “Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History” showcases nearly seventy works from his four major series, enabling audiences to gain an in-depth understanding of Demand’s exploration of the relationship between photographic images and reality, along with his examination of cultural inertia and epistemic paradoxes within contemporary society.
Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson will present his Southeastern Asian touring exhibition titled “Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey,” featuring his artistic practices from the past 30 years, including installations, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and videos. Presenting a wide array of artworks that employ natural elements, light, color and movement, the exhibition invites visitors to explore perception and the cultural conditions that shape it. Each artwork has undergone its own journey to meet the audience here in Taipei, carrying with it a mixture of intentions, interpretations, and contexts. When the audience bring their own associations to the artworks, it further expands their meaning. Several artworks are, in fact, entirely dependent on the viewer's visual, cognitive, or physical engagement and come to life through stimulating the body and senses. “Your curious journey” encourages the audience to reconceive the intangible elements that make up existence, re-examining their perception of themselves, the museum, and the world.
Six Solo Exhibitions Featuring Taiwanese Artists Across Generations
“Kuroshio: Jun T. Lai Retrospective” (working title), curated by art critic Chang Ching-Wen, symbolizes the pure yet profound and versatile yet consistent attributes of the artist’s work. Jun T. Lai (b. 1953) was inspired by Liao Chi-Chun during her college years and began to explore colors as a means of expression. While studying in Japan, she formulated the core concepts for her later spatial works. In the 1980s, she delved into the potential of painting through abstract arrangements of pure colors, earning recognition in major competition exhibitions, including the Contemporary Art Trends R.O.C. Subsequently, she established the Studio of Contemporary Art (SOCA) to advocate for avant-garde art. In the 1990s, she revisited Eastern aesthetics, which led to new insights that inspired her to draw from nature and her inner feelings through her sensibility. Following 2007, she focused on living and creating art on Taiwan’s eastern coast, redirecting her attention to the independent expression of colors while expressing a profound desire for nature. This exhibition will explore the artist’s creative journey through four themes spanning from the 1980s to the present. It will feature nearly one hundred exhibits, including oil, acrylic, and mixed media paintings, as well as sculptures, installations, hand drawings, manuscripts, videos, and archives.
Steph Huang, the Grand Prize winner of the 2022 Taipei Art Awards, will present her solo exhibition, “Lili Deli.” This exhibition takes the shape of a shop and employs multimedia elements to deconstruct daily eating and shopping habits. Huang examines the influence of capitalism on today’s culture, characterized by a “cheap” and “convenient" lifestyle. The exhibition weaves together local traditions and street vendor influences. By merging a nostalgic shop name with a modern presentation style, it creates a familiar yet oddly surreal reflection of our era. The TFAM Solo Exhibitions feature four artists, each excelling in different mediums and recognized for their distinct creative perspectives on various intriguing topics. “Even When Our Shouts Are Out of Sync” by Lee Tzu-Tung highlights the struggle of being unable to realistically convey the experience of trauma during her making of an experimental documentary film. “Outline-Copying Calligraphy” by Ko Liang-Chih depicts a space that resembles a confined construction site, where the artist will copy various calligraphy fonts designed for commercial use, revealing a tension that is both artificial and mechanical while probing the modern significance of “writing.” Hsu Jui-Chien’s “Feeling the Units” invites viewers to explore the potential within materials and objects. Featuring numerous items undefined by their intended purpose, the artist encourages the audience to engage physically by measuring with their bodies and observing their relationship with the displayed objects. Peng Hung-Chih’s “Unfinished Work - A Psychic As a Screenwriter” reflects on the influences of three prematurely deceased theater pioneers in Taiwan, combining a single-channel video with a large-scale mechanical installation.
International Exhibitions: the 14th Taipei Biennial and Contemporary Image Exhibition
The 14th Taipei Biennial will be curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, directors of Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery of Contemporary Art. With expertise spanning art history, theatre, economics, and politics, Bardaouil and Fellrath are recognized for exploring the tight bond between art exhibitions and their urban settings, as well as the potential for local history and international dialogue. They create meaningful connections with local communities through innovative public programs. This biennial will delve into the complex layers of Taiwanese history, building on a foundation of exhibitions, performances, site-specific projects, and forums. It aims to illuminate the profound links between personal memories and collective consciousness, ultimately reshaping our relationship with the world through ideas shaped by sensibility.
“Theater of the Times: Contemporary Images and Their Many Interpretations,” curated by TFAM curator Sharleen Yu, focuses on the evolution of image production, tracing the journey from the analog to the digital era. It examines the transformation in the roles of photographers, the meanings of images, and the methods of their production. With the rise of digital images, modern photographers have largely embraced an anti-reportage style, aiming to modify or slow down the traditional pace of reportage photography. They have moved away from capturing the so-called decisive or conflicting moments, often employing medium- or large-format cameras to express a subjective perspective through composed and stylized representations. The exhibition features three themes: “Invisible Subjects,” “Transformation and Rebirth,” and “Visual Landscape,” displaying contemporary documentary images from 17 artists both from Taiwan and abroad, including works by Hiroshi Sugimoto and Sohei Nishino, on loan from the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. Through these pieces, the exhibition seeks to elucidate concerns and interpretations regarding daily life, social practices, and cultural actions.
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