Taipei Fine Arts Museum Unveils 2026 Highlights
January 7, 2026 ——The Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) is delighted to announce its highlights for 2026, featuring two prominent international exhibitions Ryuichi Sakamoto | seeing sound, hearing time; Surrealism: Worlds in Dialogue; two themed exhibitions curated by TFAM; and solo exhibitions by mid-generation and emerging artists. Additionally, TFAM will present Taiwan’s representation at the Venice Biennale in Italy, Screen Melancholy: Li Yi-Fan.
TFAM Flagship Exhibitions:
the Taipei Biennial and the Taiwan Exhibition at the Venice Biennale
Since its opening, the 14th Taipei Biennial “Whisper on the Horizon” has received widespread acclaim and was named one of “the 10 Best Shows Around the World of 2025” by Frieze. Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, Directors of the Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery of Contemporary Art in Berlin, the exhibition delves into Taiwan’s layered history through the concept of “yearning.” Features artists from diverse cultural backgrounds, the biennial showcases works that examine the intricate intersections of personal memory and collective consciousness. Through a spatial design utilizing textile partitions, the exhibition creates a translucent, fluid sensory experience that foster continuous dialogues between artworks. Running until Mar 29, the biennial will conclude with a durational piece by artist Lina Lapelytė, further extending her exploration of the collective voice.
In May, the Taiwan’s Representation at the 61st Venice Biennale will present the work of artist Li Yi-Fan. Curated by Raphael Fonseca, curator of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art at the Denver Art Museum, and titled Screen Melancholy, the exhibition addresses the contemporary anxiety and malaise stemming from the flattening of perception in a digitally mediated world. Li will continue his investigation into image-generation technologies and improvisational narratives, employing a singular artistic language to challenge traditional modes of viewing. In an era of information and image overload with rapid turnover, Li offers a poignant reflection on perception, subjective consciousness, and how humanity will express itself in the future, conveying the resonance of Taiwanese contemporary art within a global digital context.
Two International Collaborations: Expanding the Spectrum of Artistic Perception
Ryuichi Sakamoto | seeing sound, hearing time surveys the pioneering artistic practice of the late composer and artist Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952–2023) from the 2000s onward. The exhibition illuminates how Sakamoto transcended the boundaries of sound, image, light, and technology to shape a new vocabulary for contemporary perceptual experience. Featuring seven large-scale installations alongside selected archival materials, the exhibition showcases his long-term collaborations with artists such as Shiro Takatani, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Zakkubalan, Carsten Nicolai, and Daito Manabe. At its core, the exhibition examines how Sakamoto transformed music into a spatial experience that can be seen and perceived, echoing his ceaseless inquiry into "Installation Music" in his later years. It invites audiences to rediscover Sakamoto's interdisciplinary influence across music, technology, and visual culture. His practice not only broadened the horizons of contemporary sound but also proposed a profound new way to listen to and reflect upon the world.
Surrealism: Worlds in Dialogue, organized by the Institut für Kulturaustausch, Tübingen (IKA), traces the history of Surrealism and its profound impact over the last century. The Surrealist Manifesto, published in 1924, laid the groundwork for a significant movement that led to a major cultural revolution, and its ideas and practices continue to spark dialogue and resonate with later generations. The exhibition is divided into four subthemes: “The Collective Dream,” “The Magical Metamorphosis,” “The Playfully Irrational,” and “The Desired Object.” It showcases around 120 artworks by major Surrealist artists, including Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Claude Cahun, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, and David Lynch, among others, spanning paintings, installations, photographic works, videos, and films.
Two Themed Exhibitions: Probing the Interdependence of Humanity, Materiality, and the World
Material World (working title), curated by Feng Hsin, begins with the bilateral relationship between humans and materials. It examines how humanity, transitioning from agrarian to industrial-commercial societies, has employed inventions and mass production to transform lifestyles and social structures, while also pondering how materials have influenced and shaped human experiences and perceptions of the world. The exhibition unfolds across four dimensions: production, sales, surplus, and residues of materials in contemporary society; how combinations and representations of materials constitute attributes of physical environments and mirror shifting social conditions; how artists employ displacement and assembly to unlock the latent fantasies within everyday objects; and how external matters act as carriers for internal states and philosophical inquiry. The exhibition builds on TFAM’s collection, featuring works mainly from the 1990s onward, as well as new commissions by artists Tang Ya-Wen and Lee Kit.
Entanglement: The Rhythm of Being, curated by Sharleen Yu, draws inspiration from French philosopher Bruno Latour’s concept of the “critical zone,” which envisions the Earth’s surface as a space of interactions among natural, technological, political, and cultural forces. Within this framework, humans and objects, subjects and objects, are seen as co-generating through technology, perception, and material action rather than as dichotomous. Consequently, “entanglement” transcends mere emotional projections; it acts as gravitational force linking the self and everything. In our current era of AI-driven algorithms, although comprehensive and rapid data processing has become possible, reality is succumbing to technological control, further increasing human alienation and opposition. This exhibition encourages visitors to rediscover symbiotic, empathetic relationships among humans, objects, and technology, fostering shared values of mutual support for the future. Featured artists and collectives include Chou Tung-Yen (Very Theatre), Simple Noodle Art, Tsai Pou-Ching, Wu Chi-Yu, Yamashiro Chikako, Céline Clanet, and Sonja Bäumel.
Solo Exhibition Featuring Mid-Generation Taiwanese Artist’s Survey
Wang Yahui: A Retrospective (working title), curated by Lei Yi-Ting and Hsuan-Chun Lin, presents a comprehensive survey of the work of Wang Yahui (1973–2023), a significant figure in Taiwanese contemporary art. Born in Taipei, Wang received her BFA from the Department of Fine Arts at National Taiwan Normal University in 1998 and her MFA from the Graduate Institute of Arts and Technology at National Taipei University of the Arts in 2004. A recipient of the Taipei Arts Award (2002) and the YAGEO Tech-Art Award (2005), Wang was a recurring voice in the Taipei Biennial (2002, 2010, and 2023) with her works Gap, Artist Cinema – The Dark, and Visitor, respectively. Wang was known for transforming subtle observations of daily spaces and nuances of everyday experiences into imagined scenes, with low-tech methods or handcrafted props. Her work blended the abstract with the concrete, the material with the immaterial, the three-dimensional with the two-dimensional, the real with the illusory, and the temporal with the spatial, expanding viewers’ perceptions from microcosmic details to cosmic scales through a poetic lens. This exhibition features over twenty years of artistic practice, presenting video installations, kinetic sculptures, and photography, alongside a rare look at her private notes, sketches, and documentary footage.
Deepening Research and Initiatives in Collections, Publications and New Artistic Potentialities
With a rich collection of pioneer artists' works and a long-standing commitment to research and restoration, the TFAM is proud to support the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA) in its upcoming exhibition, Rhythmic Beauty in the Interplay of Colors: Liao Chi-Chun’s World of Art. TFAM is lending 35 significant works for the show, highlighted by the 1928 masterpiece Courtyard with Banana Trees, which was selected for the 9th Imperial Art Exhibition (Teiten). This partnership allows visitors to trace the full evolution of Liao’s artistry and underscores the shared mission of both institutions to advance the study and public appreciation of Taiwanese art history.
Beyond the gallery walls, the Museum continues to deepen its theoretical contributions through the “TFAM Contemporary Texts” publishing project. Conceived to bridge contemporary practice with critical theory, the series has previously unpacked the discourses of Performance and Archive. This year, the series will release Contemporary Texts: Technics, which reevaluate the intersection of art and technology in three parts: “Art and Theory,” “Consciousness and Body,” and “Machine and Computation.” The book features new translations of eight seminal essays from 1810 to 1996, including landmark text by Alan Turing (Can Digital Computers Think?) and Martin Heidegger (The Question Concerning Technology).
In tandem with these theoretical endeavors, TFAM continues to pioneer new exhibition formats in response to constantly evolving technologies. Launched in 2024, the “TFAM Net.Open” introduced the online exhibition Vanishing Acts in September last year. Curated by independent curator and new media scholar Doreen A. Ríos, the exhibition features internet art by four international and local artists, exploring how contemporary art disrupts the digital era’s dogma of information accumulation, questioning how we perceive existence and the dissipation of memory within environments sculpted by digital tools. Running through the end of the year, the platform features regularly updated artworks complemented by hybrid online/offline events, engaging audiences through contemporary digital vocabularies and interactive display formats.
For more information on the museum’s exhibitions and events in 2026, please follow TFAM’s official website (www.tfam.museum) and social media platforms (Facebook /Instagram).
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