Sun, May 17, 2026 page8

• Taiwan defies Beijing with its art

  • By Stefano Pelaggi
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  As geopolitical disputes erupt across the Venice Biennale over contested pavilions, protests and questions of national identity, Taiwan has once again secured a place at the world’s most prestigious art exhibition through a carefully negotiated arrangement that allows it to participate without official state recognition. Far from the Biennale’s main national pavilions, inside a former Venetian prison dating to 1614, Taipei has quietly maintained a continuous presence for 30 years in a space the official program still cannot openly describe as representing a country.

  The 61st International Art Exhibition has opened in Venice during what might be the most politically fraught edition in the Biennale’s modern history. There have been jury resignations, withdrawn invitations, contested pavilions and public letters of protest: Geopolitics has entered the Giardini with a force that has unsettled the institution’s long-cultivated posture of aesthetic autonomy.

  The argument running through the pavilions this spring is, at its core, a dialectical one. On one side stands a tradition that conceives of art as a democratic terrain — a place where dissenting voices can be heard, where state alignments matter less than artistic merit. On the other side is a more cynical reading: The Biennale is, and has always been, a stage of state representation, an instrument of soft power dressed in the language of culture. The latest edition has made it impossible to pretend the two readings coexist comfortably.

  It is against this backdrop that Taiwan’s participation deserves attention. Among the dozens of national presences crowding Venice this season, Taiwan offers a model that is neither loud nor confrontational. It is, instead, a quieter method of presence — the result of 30 years of accumulated diplomatic carefulness — and one that has acquired a new resonance in a moment when louder strategies are visibly faltering.

  Taiwan is not on the Biennale’s official list of participating countries. It is listed as “Taipei Fine Arts Museum of Taiwan,” and its exhibition is classified under the category of “Collateral Events.”

  The formula describes an institution rather than a state and imitates the grammar of compromise in the name “Chinese Taipei,” used by Taiwan’s national team at the Olympic Games. Taiwan’s pavilion is not housed in the Giardini, where national pavilions are concentrated, but in the Palazzo delle Prigioni, a 17th-century former prison rented from the city authorities just behind the Doge’s Palace.

  The arrangement was negotiated in 1995, when Lin Mun-lee (林曼麗), then director of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, first secured a space in Venice. The timing was not coincidental: Those were also the years in which Italy was opening its own representative office in Taipei, a parallel gesture of unofficial recognition. The Venetian compromise itself was sketched out in a letter from Gian Luigi Rondi, then president of the Biennale, which laid down the formula that has held ever since. The early pavilions still carried the country’s name openly — in 1997, the exhibition was titled “Taiwan Taiwan: Facing Faces.” However, after a formal protest from Beijing in 1999 citing the “one China” policy, the Biennale began removing the name from its official communications. What remained was a bureaucratic designation that, perhaps without meaning to, makes room for what cannot otherwise be named.

  That logic captures the peculiar shape of Taiwan’s presence in Venice. Each edition is an act of insistence: The pavilion is there, the works are there, the visitors are there, the Taiwanese institutional flags fly inside the building. What is missing is only the name.

  The operation continues year after year, sustained by the patient work of Taiwanese diplomatic representation in Italy, joined in recent years by a dedicated cultural office, which has secured the country a standing place at the world’s most important art event.

  This year’s exhibition, “Screen Melancholy” by Li Yi-fan (李亦凡), makes the metaphor unusually legible. Born in Taipei in 1989, Li is the youngest artist to represent Taiwan in Venice in more than a decade.

  Through digital avatars, which he controls in real time with a virtual-reality headset, he stages a long meditation on how images are produced and on the difficulty of locating oneself within systems built by others.

  A disembodied eye drifts through the work, searching for a body it cannot quite find. It is hard, watching it, not to read the figure as an institutional self-portrait.

  While other national presences at the Biennale are making their political positions through gestures of absence — resignations, boycotts and withdrawn invitations — Taiwan is making its position through a stubborn insistence on showing up.

  The strategy does not produce headlines, but it has the quiet advantage of being almost impossible to dismantle: There is nothing dramatic to push back against, only a building, a museum’s name and an exhibition that opens on schedule.

  At a moment when the geopolitical pressures on cultural institutions are mounting everywhere, Taiwan’s Venetian method could offer a lesson that exceeds its immediate context. To be present without being named is a humiliation only if presence itself is treated as conditional on naming.

  The Palazzo delle Prigioni suggests another possibility: that what cannot be said in the program can still be said in the work, and that 30 years of uninterrupted attendance constitute their own kind of statement — made in a register that no protest can silence.

  Stefano Pelaggi is a researcher at Sapienza University of Rome and founder of the Taiwan Studies Center. He is the author of several works on Taiwan, most recently The Suspended Island: A History of Taiwan from Its Origins to the Chip War. He serves on the Board of the European Association of Taiwan Studies.
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