Sneak preview: Asian pavilions at the 2024 Venice Biennale

Since its 19th-century beginnings, the Venice Biennale has invited artists to represent their countries in national pavilions. But art’s power to traverse and transcend national—and other—borders is a driving force at the 60th Venice Biennale (20 April-24 November), which focuses on marginalised identities and the Global South. The curator Adriano Pedrosa describes his theme, Foreigners Everywhere, as a “call to action” as forcibly displaced people around the world have reached a record high. Many of the Asian artists participating in this year’s pavilions appear to have heeded the call. Here is our guide to their boundary-crossing contributions, ranging from the migrant species growing in Singapore’s forests to a spectacular sea voyage into Cantonese myth.

Japan: Yuko Mohri

Electrodes plugged into decomposing fruit will generate power for Yuko Mohri’s acoustic sculptures coming to the Japan pavilion, an installation billed as a critical commentary on environmental issues. The artist says she is interested in how a crisis can paradoxically trigger “the highest levels of creativity”. Inspiration came from seeing Tokyo railway workers improvise systems to catch water leaks in their stations, using upturned umbrellas, buckets, tubes and tape. The bigger crises on Mohri’s mind include the Covid-19 pandemic, the disastrous 2019 flooding of Venice and the threat of rising sea levels due to the climate emergency. “Sensing the beginning of a fresh era of response to global challenges, I want to present an innovative vision that opens a new path to the future,” she says.

The Philippines: Mark Salvatus

The artist Mark Salvatus came up with the term “Salvage Projects” to describe his interdisciplinary practice. His video and installation works for the Philippine pavilion will salvage the mystical histories of Mount Banahaw, a volcano with sacred significance near Lucban, the artist’s hometown. The title, Waiting just behind the curtain of this age, borrows the words of the 19th-century revolutionary preacher Hermano Puli, who was executed by the Spanish colonial authorities for leading a religious order of native Filipinos—a response to the racial discrimination of the Catholic Church. Puli’s life and legacy will be explored alongside a parallel history of Lucban’s migrant musicians since the 1950s. Salvatus’s narratives of resistance and renewal aim to evoke the “transformative potency of the local imagination”, according to a press statement.

Timor-Leste: Maria Madeira

Asia’s youngest nation, Timor-Leste, will participate in the Venice Biennale for the first time, 25 years after the referendum that decided its independence from Indonesia. Its representing artist Maria Madeira was evacuated from Timor-Leste soon after its 1975 decolonisation from Portugal and the Indonesian invasion; her family lived for several years as refugees in Portugal before resettling in Australia. Madeira’s show Kiss and Don’t Tell pays tribute to the resilience of Timorese women, incorporating traditional materials such as the betel nut and the ceremonial cloth tais. For three special performances during the Biennale pre-opening, on 17-19 April, she will kiss the walls with lipstick and sing the spiritual mourning song Ina Lou in the indigenous language Tetun, described as a call for collective “unity with our mother land”.

Singapore: Robert Zhao Renhui

The artist Robert Zhao Renhui set up the pseudo-scientific Institute of Critical Zoologists in Singapore as a vehicle to explore the relationship between humans and animals. Like a research scientist, he has spent years on his latest investigation: a study of Singapore’s secondary forests, where nature is once again regenerating after environmental and human-caused disruptions. Zhao draws parallels between these disregarded sites on the fringes of Singapore’s hyper-urbanised environment, often filled with “migrant” invasive plant and animal species, and the dynamics of human society. His Venice presentation of video works, sound and sculptural installations, Seeing Forest, seeks to open our eyes to the “richness and variety” of secondary forests as “radically hospitable” spaces.

Taiwan: Yuan Goang-Ming

Everyday War, the centrepiece of Yuan Goang-Ming’s Taiwanese Pavilion exhibition, imagines a violent air strike devastating a house, filmed in Yuan’s own home. From the ruins, the house is restored in slow motion to its original domestic calm. The pioneering video artist says he wants to “metaphorically explore the hidden fears and threats of Taiwan in its current state of existence”, a timely allusion to rising military pressure on the self-governed island, which mainland China considers a breakaway region. A sense of eerie suspense continues in Everyday Maneuver, an earlier work capturing the annual ritual of the Wanan Air Raid Drill, when all Taiwanese rehearse their responses to a possible attack.

South Korea: Koo Jeong A

“What is your scent memory of Korea?” was the intriguing question posed in an open call last summer by the artist Koo Jeong A. More than 600 Koreans (including defectors from North Korea) and foreign residents alike wrote back with their answers, which Koo and her team have distilled into 17 different scents in collaboration with perfumers. Visitors to the Korean pavilion will be immersed in their creations via a levitating, scent-diffusing bronze figure. Titled Odorama Cities, the project seeks to transcend geographical borders and the limits of the visible world to map a nation through collective memory. It typifies the subtlety of Koo’s ephemeral art interventions, which work through traces and the senses to show that “nothing is merely ordinary”.

Nordic Countries: Lap-See Lam, Kholod Hawash and Tze Yeung Ho

Lo Ting, the half-fish, half-man of Cantonese myth, is the protagonist of the Altersea Opera, conceived by the Swedish artist Lap-See Lam for the Nordic Pavilion. The work narrates his yearning for a lost home, Fragrant Harbour, another name for Hong Kong. Biennale visitors will follow his journey within a spectral dragon ship installation, inspired by a travelling Cantonese opera troupe and a floating Chinese restaurant that once sailed from Shanghai to Sweden. Ideas of migration, displacement and belonging are at the heart of Lam’s show, the first in the Nordic Pavilion to feature Asian diaspora artists. Lam has collaborated with the Norwegian composer Tze Yeung Ho, who is also of Hong Kong Cantonese descent, and with the Iraqi-Finnish textile artist Kholod Hawash to realise the supernatural Gesamtkunstwerk.