2024 Asian Art Biennial
How to Hold Your Breath
National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
Taichung
Nov 16, 2024–Mar 2, 2025

Several biennials in Asia in 2024 used darkness as a curatorial tool, both thematically and visually. The 15th Gwangju Biennale envisioned postapocalyptic landscapes, while the Buddhism- and anarcho-pirate-themed Busan Biennale 2024 was titled “Seeing in the Dark.” While the world is getting grimmer still, the seventh Asian Art Biennial, titled “How to Hold Your Breath,” inverts the cynic’s idiom of “don’t hold your breath” to invoke strategies of resilience, introspection, and preparation. 

Convened at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts by Fang Yen Hsiang with four co-curators—Anne Davidian, Merv Espina, Haeju Kim, and Aslı Seven—the Biennial brought together 35 artists from over 20 countries whose works explored minor histories around the margins and in the crevices of the world today and speculated on the role of rituals, both mystical and communal, that can anchor ourselves in dismal times. The five curators proposed that it is “in these relationships that we create, where we hold our breath together, that we might find the seeds for imagining a future that resists despair and opens toward new directions.” They raised the key question: how can we cultivate collective practices that foster hope and connection in an increasingly fragmented world?

Rituals of mourning and remembrance predominated across many artworks. Sharon Chin's installation Portal (2024), for instance, comprised a memorial of oil lamps (made from discarded alcohol bottles) to a pair of mangrove plants in Port Dickson, Malaysia, that were destroyed by the impacts of pollution and storms. Her photographs on the walls capture the two dying trees and the seascape ecologically ravaged by tanker ships and concrete infrastructure, as well as her in-situ rituals for the departed lifeforms. Similarly commemorative and defiant is Noor Abed’s 30-minute film, A Night We Held Between (2024), shot on 16mm, in which the artist captures a small group of people navigating caves, underground passages, and wild valleys in Palestine before joining together around a fire for community rituals of folk dancing and singing after the sun sets. In her video performance Yokhor (2018), Natalia Papaeva demonstrates the pain of losing her native tongue by singing in Buryat (from the Buryatia region of Siberia) the only two lines she remembers from a traditional song, as she grows increasingly frustrated and emotional.

Contemporary art’s capacity to be a site of resistance to lost histories was explored in several works. For her Erased Slogans (2015) project, Kiri Dalena unearths photographs from the Manila Chronicle newspaper’s archive of street protests by students and workers from the 1970s. She intervenes digitally by erasing the slogans from their signs and banners, reenacting not only the historical erasure of the Martial Law era but also placing emphasis on other parts of the historical imagery for context and content. The images have echoes of the White Paper Protests in November 2022 across China against Covid-19 restrictions and censorship. Loss and erasure are key elements of Cici Wu’s film Belonging and Difference (2023), made with collaborator Yuan Yuan, which traces dying businesses in New York’s Chinatown, to a shuttered foreign-language bookshop in Beijing, and historical sites in the city where commemorations are forbidden. Revisiting the often little-known legacies of Asian migration to the Caribbean and the Americas, Tao Leigh Goffe’s two-channel film Black Pacific, Chinese Atlantic (2024) is a personal history of her grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s return to China from Jamaica and New York; the family story is narrated with historical imagery of colonial Jamaica and video recordings made in 1985 as they explored the streets and waterways of colonial Hong Kong.

Displacement and migrant labor became another central thread throughout the Biennial. Taichung, and Taiwan at large, like many East Asian countries including Japan and South Korea, have increasingly recruited foreign domestic and healthcare workers amid declining populations. Nil Yalter’s series of multilingual posters Exile is a Hard Job (1975– ), based on photographs of migrant workers from Anatolia and the Balkans who moved to Europe in the 1970s, were displayed at public sites around Taichung and at ASEAN Square, where migrant workers gather on weekends. Jasmin Werner’s self-supporting (2024) series of stacked geometric sculptures are based on the food and domestic goods packaged as “balikbayan boxes,” of products that overseas Filipino workers send to their families back home. Julia Sarisetiati’s project follows the development of a platform named PulangPergi that aims to share knowledge and experiences between current and past migrants workers, including Caregiving Vocabularies (2024), a series of videos shown in the Biennial in which migrant workers teach prospective workers the key vocabulary for their occupation. Bridging historical colonialism’s effects on populations and plants, Breadfruit, Mutiny and Planetarity (2024), Nathalie Muchamad’s installation and series of prints on fabric, traces the propagation of the breadfruit tree from Taiwan and Polynesia to the Caribbean as source of low-cost food for slave workers on sugar-cane plantations in the British West Indies—a project that tied together the Biennial’s themes of ecological damage and displacement to contemporary global communities.

The levity in “How to Hold Your Breath,” and the idea of humor as a form of subversive resilience, comes from late-2000s performance-video art based around small, absurdist actions. Breathing as a durational action and breath as a material is the explicit subject in Pak Sheung Chuen’s video Breathing in a House (2006), which captures the Hong Kong artist filling a small apartment in Busan with clear plastic bags of his own exhaled air over the course of ten days until he is physically displaced from the tiny space (the size of his own Hong Kong flat). The exhibition featured six of Yoshinori Niwa’s videos, including two that were created in 2024 for the exhibition. The first, Purchasing a Rice Ball at Convenience Stores for 24 Hours (2024), captures the artist’s tour of FamilyMart stores in Taichung where he repeatedly purchased the same rice ball in a kind of “reverse shoplifting” or hacking of the capitalistic system at its most fundamental level of simple commerce, while the second was more overtly provocative, with the artist asking residents to Taichung to declare (in an enigmatic but politically loaded phrase), “If I die, Taiwan will disappear.” 

Multi-curator biennials often contend with how to speak with a unified or polyphonic voice—with the 2024 Asian Art Biennial tending more toward the latter, even as the curatorial authorship behind specific threads in the exhibition was never made explicit. As such, as an exhibition, “How to Hold Your Breath,” curated by five individuals working together for the first time, demonstrated its own kind of pluriverse, where (in the five curators’ words, from their curatorial introduction) “multiple worlds coexist and continually shift.” At times the exhibition’s eclecticism tipped into dissonance, as in the case of Trương Quế Chi  and Nguyễn Phương Linh’s installation in a dark room, Sourceless Waters: White.Shadows (2024), featuring black rubber balls on a large round tabletop that tips up and down while a white sheet of muslin cloth is mechanically draped over the structure. This large but confounding work was situated in a large gallery between two works meant to evoke mystical or altered states of being: Andrius Arutiunian’s darkened room filled with a soundtrack of resonant chords and with a single bright light beam shining on a golden reflective surface; and Saodat Ismailova’s three-channel film Arslanbob (2024) about a walnut grove in Kyrgyzstan that emits hallucinogenic gases and inspires mythological tales. The diversity of curatorial approaches and artistic practices in “How to Hold Your Breath” was a source of interest, as the five curators brought artworks from different parts of Asia and its diasporas together into unexpected conversations, but it also created occasional incongruity, as one stepped or leaped from one world into the next.

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