[Issue 2] How do we pronounce NTMoFA?

Becoming an Acronym: Taiwan at the 2026 Gwangju Biennale

In the weeks leading up to the 16th Gwangju Biennale, scheduled to open in September 2026, a dispute emerged over the name under which Taiwan would appear in the Biennale’s Pavilion program. Taiwan’s participation, organized by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA), had been proposed, contracted, and prepared under the name “Taiwan Pavilion” since earlier this year. The first unsettling sign surfaced in a group email sent by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation on 10 June, in which the subject line replaced "Taiwan Pavilion" with "NTMoFA Pavilion."  Later, when the Foundation began releasing its official promotional materials, the designation had been replaced by “NTMoFA,” the museum’s institutional acronym. The controversy intensified after the Biennale released its official pavilion poster in early August. On the poster listing participating pavilions, names such as Brazil, France, Indonesia, China, and Canada remained visible, while the word “Taiwan” was left out. Instead, an awkward, unpronounceable “NTMOFA” was there. The change was made without the participating Taiwanese artists and curators’ consent and, to date, the Foundation has not provided a public announcement or explained the reason in any form.

Taiwanese authorities had already become aware of the discrepancy before it developed into a public controversy. According to Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, its representative office in Busan raised the matter with the organizers in early July. NTMoFA subsequently pursued discussions through the curatorial team, while Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture publicly objected to the alteration on 9 August and issued another protest again on the 17th. 

Besides the official protests from Taiwan’s government, 10 participating Taiwanese artists and curators, including Chang Wen-Hsuan, Chen Hsiang-Wen, Chen Wan-Yin, Cheng Hsien-Yu, Hsu Che-Yu, Li Yi-Fan, Lin Yu-Liang, Poyuan Juan, Su Hui-Yu, Ting-Ting Cheng, issued a joint statement entitled “A Pavilion under Censorship” on 15 August. They accused the Gwangju Biennale Foundation of political censorship and demanded the restoration of the original name. Their objection was not framed simply as a diplomatic dispute over national terminology. They argued that an international art institution founded upon the historical legacy of democracy, human rights, and the spirit of Gwangju bears a particular responsibility to explain why “participants’ right to name and identify themselves” should be subject to political restriction. The incident, they warned, also belongs to a wider pattern in which nationality, political position, and institutional pressure increasingly determine how artists and exhibitions may appear on international platforms.

On 18 August, the day that the Taiwan Pavilion was initially scheduled to enter the venue for installation, the response in Taiwan had expanded beyond the participating artists and government agencies into the broader cultural sector. The Association of the Visual Arts in Taiwan released a statement in three languages, Mandarin Chinese, English, and Korean, demanding that the Gwangju Biennale restore “Taiwan Pavilion” across its official materials and disclose the decision-making process, legal justification, and any source of external pressure behind the change. 

This is, sadly, not the first time that Taiwan has been intentionally hidden from view, like the “you know who” in wizard novels. Besides the ungrammatical “Chinese Taipei” used in all sports games, in the 25th São Paulo Art Biennial in 2002, the title of Taiwan’s national pavilion was changed overnight to the Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei. This was revealed to have been caused by the Chinese government, who pressured the organizer to remove “Taiwan”. In protest, representing artist Chien-Chi Chang, with the neighbouring Austrian artist, invited other artists to donate letters from their own country titles in order to spell out and recreate the word "Taiwan" at the pavilion entrance. Reportedly, the Austrian artist took the initiative and took the letter "t" from Austria's name plate; Canada donated the letter “a”; Croatia sent in the letter “i”; Puerto Rico gave away an “o”, which was cut into two pieces to form the letter "w"; Singapore donated another "a" and finally, Panama finished with the "n."

As an editor of the online academic magazine Taiwan Insight, I, too, have my fair share of editing a few articles in the past year about how Taiwan has less-than-mysteriously disappeared. As Isis M. Lee writes, in September 2025, Prague, Czech Republic, welcomed an exhibition of 100 treasures from Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, an extraordinary cultural exchange.​​ However, not a single panel or caption at the exhibition mentioned “Taiwan” despite it being the home to every piece in the collection. Lee’s article references an incident from a year earlier in France, which Romain Blachier later discussed in his recent publication. In 2024, Taiwan was announced as the first guest of honour of the Festival Off d’Avignon, France’s largest performing-arts market. Yet, the Festival Off’s website displays “Taïwan (Chine),” glossed in English as “Taiwan (China).” Where the English version calls Taiwan a guest country, the French version never uses the word "pays" (country in French).  In some of the cases above, it is without publicly available evidence whether Taiwan’s disappearance was a direct result of Chinese interference, the organizers’ self-censorship, or miscommunication. 

Nevertheless, names are important. A name is how a person perceives and understands themselves, and how they wish to be known and introduced to others. “Taiwan Pavilion” was the name under which the project was developed for the Gwangju Biennale. Changing the name, with or without the participating team’s agreement, is not merely a change of words, using a synonym, pseudonym or nickname, but a deprivation of a person or a nation’s identity, a decontextualization of their history, culture, and everything, and an erasure of their presence. Just like in the animation Spirited Away, the protagonist Chihiro signs away her name, and from then on, she becomes Sen. Chihiro falls under a spell that threatens to make her forget everything she knows; her connection to her name is vital to helping her remember. The person who takes away her name also steals everything from her, especially her identity. If one no longer remembers themselves, how can others remember them?

Furthermore, the controversy carries particular weight because Gwangju is not an ordinary site in the international cultural imagination. The city has become globally associated with the struggle for democracy, freedom, and liberation through the memory of the 1980 democratic uprising, when citizens resisted military rule and were met with violent state repression. In the decades since, Gwangju has deliberately transformed that traumatic history into a civic and cultural identity: the city has hosted international forums on human rights and democracy, and cultivated networks of solidarity with democratic movements elsewhere in Asia. 

Moreover, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Han Kang, as a resident of Gwangju, has long written about collective trauma, including Human Acts (2014), a novel about the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, when citizens resisted the military government and were met with a brutal massacre. The writer was blacklisted by the Park Geun-hye government, and her work was censored for the accusation of dividing the nation. Han’s Nobel Prize, along with other international awards, underscores the importance of freedom and democracy, as well as remembering, documenting, and narrating the past. Gwangju, as a city, is not just where she is from; it nurtures her work, which continues to inspire many others. Founded in 1995, the Gwangju Biennale was conceived “in memory of the spirit of civil uprising resulting from the 1980 repression of the Gwangju Democratization Movement”, as written in one of its posts. Therefore, it inherits more than the history of a city, but embodies a collective effort built around resistance to authoritarian power, the preservation of suppressed memory, and the right of people to speak against the terms imposed on them by the state. 

Indeed, erasing the name of a democratic state in Gwangju carries more weight than it would in any other place. The issue is not simply whether the word “Taiwan” appears on a poster. It is about censorship, self-imposed or not, that has undermined the foundation of the event, and by extension, artistic freedom. Artist Chang Wen-Hsuan adds, as one of the representing artists of the Taiwan Pavilion, her work “does not represent herself; it should also be understood as part of a more complete and complex network of narratives, alongside other Taiwanese artists’ work within its original framework [of Taiwan].” 

NTMOFA can be found nowhere on any maps. I tried. Google Maps may take you to the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, but it won't take you to the land, the ocean, and the sky that nurtures 23 million people, as well as the arts and cultures that they have created, surpassing the number. Each piece of art is rooted in this land and is contextualized in dialogue with others. 

Almost two months after the incident first took place, on 19 August, the Biennale Foundation issued a written response in English stating that participants exhibiting under the name of a country must submit formal authorization from an embassy or government cultural authority. According to the Foundation, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts signed the exhibition agreement on 12 January this year as an “institutional participant,” and was therefore listed under the name of the institution, refuting the accusation of political censorship, and claiming the issue was a result of “administrative and procedural disagreements”. 

Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture, alongside NTMoFA, have also explained previously that the initial proposal was submitted in late March, and that all subsequent correspondence with the Foundation consistently used the name “Taiwan Pavilion” through to the signing of the final agreement. The Ministry therefore stated that the Korean side’s account was “clearly inaccurate.” Legal counsel also provided an opinion explaining that, even if the Foundation’s stated contractual requirement for using a country’s name as the name of a pavilion were valid, such a requirement should logically apply only when a non-governmental organization seeks to participate under the name of a country. The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, however, is a central government agency in Taiwan, and therefore already represents the state. It should not require any additional form of “government authorization.” There appears to be a disparity between the two parties. 

“You Must Change Your Life” - this is the theme of this year’s Gwangju Biennale, taken from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem. In the 1908 poem, the overwhelming vitality and presence radiate from a damaged ancient statue. Confronted by the artwork’s almost judgmental intensity, the viewer is forced to turn that gaze inward, leading to the poem’s final imperative: “You must change your life.”

In the Biennale Foundation’s theme announcement, it writes, “Taking inspiration from this imperative, the Biennale explores change as an artistic method, through which artists experiment with new forms of life, power, and relation. Yet change unfolds not only in dramatic large-scale events and spectacular historical ruptures, but also quietly and continuously in our everyday lives.” The erasure of Taiwan has always been as quiet as possible. The gesture is subtle, almost imperceptible, almost assured, gentle in appearance, but cruel in effect. 

“Few cities embody the ideals and the experience of change more powerfully than Gwangju, whose history of democratic struggle continues to resonate globally. Here, change is not abstract—it is lived history,” said Artistic Director Ho Tzu Nyen. 

We are living history.

Note: I started writing this article on 17 August. Today is 21 August. Conversations between the various parties are ongoing. More statements have been released. While I have tried to rely on legitimate sources rather than social media posts, I must admit that it has been difficult as new information is coming in almost constantly, and new narratives are forming. I also attempted to look into sources in Korea. Unfortunately, my 567-day commitment to Duolingo still does not quite allow me to distinguish reliable reporting from misinformation with confidence.

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I appreciate the help from a friend, who kindly helped me understand how the issue is being framed locally after reading the draft of this article. Based on their quick research, Gwangju-based news outlets have largely downplayed the scale of the objections, presenting the controversy primarily as an extension of cross-Strait tensions between Taiwan and China in which the Biennale has simply become entangled. They minimize the institutional significance and imply that Taiwanese artists and officials may be directing their accusations toward the wrong target.

Meanwhile, the controversy has not been entirely without protest from some members of the local arts community in Gwangju, including the Gwangju-based independent bookshop Sonyeonui-seo (girlsbookshop). The statement, posted on its Instagram page, was written in Korean. I regret not being able to understand the owner’s words in their original language, but I especially appreciate that the post went back to the Biennale’s fundamental framing of the “National Pavilion.” The argument and redirection of the issue are especially powerful, and I haven’t seen anything like it in other discussions so far. The statement raises a broader critique of the very idea of national pavilions in contemporary biennials. It argues that organizing art according to nation-states feels somewhat outdated, especially when participation depends on approval from embassies or ministries of culture. Such a system risks making artistic representation dependent on state authorization rather than artistic freedom. 

The writer does not reject national pavilions altogether. Instead, they suggest that these pavilions could be used critically: not to reinforce fixed national identities, but to question what a nation is, who gets to represent it, and what art can mean beyond national boundaries.

The main criticism of the Gwangju Biennale, then, is that it has not clearly articulated an artistic or intellectual rationale for distinguishing “national pavilions” from “institutional pavilions.” Instead of treating these categories as administrative classifications, the Biennale should explain their conceptual purpose and create conditions in which artists can freely challenge, complicate, or rethink the idea of the nation itself. (My summary by no means carries the same weight or brilliance as the original post. Please read the statement on their Instagram.)

Finally, I would keep updating this article, making endless notes if I could, but they mean nothing if they stay only on my laptop. I would like to thank my friend, the founder, editor, and contributor to the Witching Archive, who helped me share my words.