Taipei Biennial
Whispers on the Horizon
Taipei Fine Arts Museum

Few sounds distill yearning as succinctly—and as universally—as a phone line: each ring announces the possibility of connection, builds anticipation, yet with every successive tone withholds the gratification of reply. Anna Jermolaewa’s On the Line (2013/25) featured three functional Soviet-era coin-operated payphones installed on different floors of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), inviting visitors not only to reactivate an obsolete system but to risk calling into silence—to project an asymmetrical desire that could, but may well never be, reciprocated. Titled “Whispers on the Horizon,” Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath’s 14th Taipei Biennial took this suspended interlude as mood, method, and function, drawing on its Chinese title’s murmuring “moan” (低吟) as a metaphor for sustained longing.

The exhibition opened with a full-scale cardboard replica of a Zero fighter plane—a life-size specter of Imperial Japanese aviation history. The sculpture anchored Ciou Zih-Yan’s commissioned installation Fake Airfield (2025), which took inspiration from a decoy airbase once built to mislead enemy bombers during Taiwan’s period of Japanese colonial rule. The work’s film component, whimsical and deadpan, routes this history through a young boy and a mad inventor’s shared reverie of flight, propelling wartime stratagem into the realm of make-believe. “I’m making something that can fly,” the inventor tells the boy. “Do you like things that can fly?”

Pretend, here, operated on several registers: as tactical deception for a military ruse; as fantasy and play; and as a first rehearsal of desire—the early, half-conscious urge to be elsewhere, otherwise, or someone else entirely. Fake Airfield’s disarmingly childlike premise belied dense layers of geopolitical referents—not least Taiwan’s fraught position between its colonial Japanese past, postwar Kuomintang rule, and ongoing territorial claims by the People’s Republic of China—and set the coordinates for a biennial that drew on local modernist literature, diasporic memory, and Indigenous cosmologies while charting a universally resonant course. Fixing its gaze on the titular “horizon”—something that continually, indeed perpetually, recedes from view, the exhibition drew visitors ever inward, ever more adrift, along shifting currents of yearning: emotional, existential, personal, and collective. By the time we perceived their pull, we had already been carried off course.