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Taiwan Names Artist for 2026 Venice Biennale
By ArtAsiaPacific
Portrait of LI YI-FAN, who will exhibit in the Taiwan Pavilion collateral exhibition at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026. Courtesy the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
On November 25, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) announced its selection of Li Yi-Fan as the artist for the next Taiwan Pavilion collateral event at the 61st Venice Biennale, which will open in April 2026.
Born in 1989, Li burst onto Taiwan’s contemporary art scene in the previous five years. His 30-minute short film, What Is Your Favorite Primitive (2023), which debuted at the 13th Taipei Biennial, “Small World,” in 2023 at TFAM, is a self-reflective and darkly funny exploration of game-engine and animation technologies. The work was also featured in the 2024 Art Spectrum exhibition “Dream Screen” at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul.
In 2024, he received the Hong Foundation’s NTD 1 million (USD 31,000) 8th Tung Chung Prize for a newly commissioned work. With support from the Hong Foundation, Li is a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten program in Amsterdam for 2024–25.
Previously, What Is Your Favorite Primitive garnered him the 46th Golden Harvest Award in 2024 at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. He won the Visual Arts Award at the 2022 Taishin Arts Award for his earlier work howdoyouturnthison (2021), which explored virtual reality and image-making tools.
The announcement was made following the closure of this year’s Venice Biennale on November 24, where artist Yuan Goang-Ming and curator Abby Chen marked the conclusion of the presentation “Everyday War.”
More details are still forthcoming from TFAM about the exhibition plans.
