Olafur Eliasson exhibition ‘Your curious journey’ opens at Taipei Fine Arts Museum

From June 21st to September 21st, 2025, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum presents Your curious journey, a major Olafur Eliasson exhibition and the artist’s first solo show in Taiwan. The Olafur Eliasson exhibition spans over 30 years of practice, featuring 17 works across installation, sculpture, painting, and photography. Organized in collaboration with art institutions across the Asia-Pacific, the exhibition fosters international dialogue in contemporary art.

The central idea behind this Olafur Eliasson exhibition is the concept of a journey—both physical and perceptual. Eliasson’s installations invite viewers to engage actively with their surroundings. Through the use of light, air, water, and elemental phenomena, the works challenge our assumptions and shift our understanding of space, perception, and self.

Among the most talked-about pieces in the Olafur Eliasson exhibition is Ventilator (1997), a fan suspended mid-air, swinging unpredictably to make the unseen air visible. Another work, Beauty (1993), casts a shimmering rainbow curtain in a darkened room, constantly changing with each viewer’s position. Meanwhile, Room for one colour (1997) immerses the space in yellow light, stripping away color perception and reshaping how we experience our environment.

A recurring theme throughout the Olafur Eliasson exhibition is the relationship between humans and nature. In The last seven days of glacial ice (2024), Eliasson presents haunting bronze and glass sculptures documenting the melting of Arctic glaciers. These visual narratives underscore the fragile balance between natural ecosystems and human impact.

The newly debuted Seismographic testimony of distance (2024–2025) further explores the relationship between humans and nature by transforming the act of transporting the artworks into a visual story, using machine-generated line drawings that map the movement and tension of the journey. Eliasson’s creative language speaks directly to the relationship between humans and nature, drawing attention to our shared ecological responsibilities. The works invite us to reflect on how we perceive our place in the world, how we affect the environment, and how the environment, in turn, shapes us.

Ultimately, Your curious journey is more than an Olafur Eliasson exhibition—it is a dynamic meditation on presence, perception, and the delicate relationship between humans and nature. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum transforms into a portal for discovery, where visitors are not mere spectators but participants in a vivid, evolving dialogue between art and the living world.