15th Shanghai Biennale: Does the flower hear the bee?

(Photos: Tan Hwee Koon)

The 15th Shanghai Biennale, Does the Flower Hear the Bee? held earlier this year at the Power Station of Art (PSA) explores new forms of sensorial communication between artworks, visitors and their environments. Curated by Canadian curator Kitty Scott, along with Daisy Desrosiers, Xue Tan, Long Yitang and Zhang Yingying, the exhibition considers human and non-human forms of intelligence through perspectives drawn from nature and culture. More than 250 works by 67 artists and collectives are presented, including more than 30 new and specially commissioned works. The title derives from the observation that flowers can detect the vibrations of honeybee wings and respond by producing sweeter nectar. 

The metaphor becomes a broader proposition: our future may depend on our ability to perceive, listen and respond to forms of intelligence beyond ourselves. In my view, the Biennale can be understood through three interconnected threads: entering and walking through a garden-like landscape; how colonial histories shape our perceptions and relationships; and insights from nature and culture. 

Discovering an indoor garden-like landscape

The concept of the garden is central to the exhibition. As PSA director Gong Yan highlights, the garden is a space where boundaries between nature and culture, ecology and political economy begin to blur. This idea extends into the exhibition design by Bangkok-based studio all(zone), led by Rachaporn Choochuey. Rather than presenting a conventional sequence of galleries, the Biennale creates an open, garden-like landscape through which visitors wander. 

Works appear across circulation paths, open spaces and enclosed rooms, while sightlines shift as visitors move. Like a Chinese scholar garden or Japanese stroll garden, the exhibition gradually reveals itself rather than presenting everything at once. Resting spaces encourage visitors to pause, observe and reflect. In this environment, the visitor becomes part of the exhibition’s ecology — another living presence moving through and shaping the space. 

The dramatic triple-height atrium of PSA provides the most striking introduction to the biennale. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s text work, The Form of the Flower is Unknown to the Seed (2025), functions almost like a giant signpost for the exhibition’s central ideas.

Behind it, Allora & Calzadilla’s Phantom Forest (2025) presents an extraordinary canopy of approximately 170,000 golden flowers from the Golden Trumpet tree, suspended without branches, trunks or roots. The installation is spectacular, but its significance lies in what is absent. By dislocating the blossoms from the forest, Phantom Forest evokes ecological displacement, migration and transformation — a forest reduced to a ghostly trace of itself. 

The importance of colonial histories

On Level 2, Haegue Yang’s monumental Accommodating the Epic Dispersion — On Non-cathartic Volume of Dispersion (2012), constructed from industrial Venetian blinds, engages the persistent legacies of colonialism, migration and global dispersion. Its shifting opacity, transparency, colour and spatial rhythm create an immersive perceptual experience in which boundaries continually appear and disappear. This theme is particularly resonant in Shanghai, a cosmopolitan city whose identity remains deeply shaped by its history as a treaty port and the former foreign concessions. 

Within the biennale, colonial history is therefore not simply historical background; it becomes part of a larger question about how colonialism has transformed relationships among people, places, nature and systems of knowledge. Several artists address these legacies from Indigenous and decolonial perspectives. In Brett Graham’s Ka Wheeke (2024), former gun turrets from the Pioneer, a warship central to the 1863 invasion of Waikato, are concealed within intricately carved black lacquer. 

Graham transforms objects associated with colonial violence into vessels of ancestral memory and presence.

Cheng Xinhao’s Re-steal (2024) similarly responds to colonial botanical extraction. Cheng traced the history of Rhododendron vernicosum, collected in Yunnan by Scottish plant hunter George Forrest in 1913, and symbolically reversed the direction of extraction by bringing a branch from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh back to Yunnan. 

The work turns a botanical specimen into an object through which histories of ownership, movement and repatriation can be reconsidered. As Kitty Scott notes, the biennale seeks to learn from Indigenous relationships to nature that differ from Western colonial models based on land ownership and extraction. These works challenge established systems of meaning by restoring agency to objects, plants, landscapes and ancestral knowledge.

Insights from nature and culture

Inomata collects wood gnawed by beavers and creates enlarged replicas, sometimes working with sculptors and sometimes using computer numerical control (CNC) milling. The resulting sculptures blur the boundaries between human and non-human authorship. Are these works made by the artist, the beavers, the machines — or through collaboration among all three?

Cristina Flores Pescorán’s Abrazar el sol (Embrace the Sun) (2023-2024) uses weaving as an “open portal” connecting ancestral knowledge, dreams and ecological resilience. 

Working with Native Peruvian cotton and threads dyed with purple corn, the artist reflects on illness, healing and cultural memory. The installation links embodied experience with the histories of plants and communities affected by colonial and industrial systems.

Hu Xiaoyuan’s I am Rooted, But I Flow (2024) brings together an extraordinary range of organic and inorganic materials, including pith paper, ink, aerospace aluminium, loofah, hair, mica, silk, wool, shells, fossils, mother-of-pearl, fish maw, insect wings, dried pomelo and decayed wood. 

The juxtaposition of perishable organic matter with industrial materials draws attention to different temporalities and cycles of transformation.

Christine Sun Kim’s Heavy Relevance (2024) extends across the gallery wall through a visual language of sound informed by the gestural syntax of American Sign Language. Distorted musical staves and enlarged musical notes connect the surrounding works while expanding the notion of communication beyond spoken language.

Together, these four works suggest that intelligence is not necessarily a uniquely human attribute. It can emerge through relationships among organisms, materials, technologies, environments and cultural memory.

Reconsidering what it means to engage

The 15th Shanghai Biennale ultimately asks visitors to reconsider what it means to communicate, perceive and know. Tania Candiani’s Resonant Blossoms (2025) invites audiences to attune themselves to frequencies from the natural and urban world that normally lie beyond human perception. Francis Alÿs’ Children’s Games reveals moments of connection through singing, humming and whistling, while Lina Lapelytė’s The Speech (2025) imagines a shared language of interspecies communication in which children vocalise not to persuade or explain, but to listen, feel and exist together.

Across the exhibition, communication becomes less an exchange of information than a process of attunement, resonance and reciprocal presence. Phantom Forest evokes ecological displacement; How to Carve a Sculpture challenges human authorship through the agency of beavers; Abrazar el sol connects ecological regeneration with ancestral knowledge; and I am Rooted, But I Flow reveals the interconnected cycles of organic and inorganic matter. 

At the same time, the biennale reminds us that our relationships with nature are shaped by history. Colonialism, extraction and systems of ownership have transformed landscapes while privileging particular forms of knowledge. Works such as Haegue Yang’s Accommodating the Epic Dispersion, Brett Graham’s Ka Wheeke and Cheng Xinhao’s Re-steal expose these histories while proposing alternative relationships grounded in memory, reciprocity and care. 

Rather than providing a definitive answer to its title, Does the Flower Hear the Bee? reframes the question itself. The more important question may be whether humans are willing to recognise the forms of intelligence, communication and memory that already exist beyond a human-centred worldview.

After nearly three decades of visiting the Shanghai Biennale — from the ink-focused second edition in 1998 to the present exhibition — the shift is striking. The biennale has moved from questions of medium, tradition and internationalisation toward broader questions of ecology, perception, colonial history and more-than-human intelligence. Does the Flower Hear the Bee? ultimately proposes a more attentive and reciprocal way of being in the world: one in which listening becomes an ethical act, and coexistence requires us to remain open to forms of knowledge we do not yet fully understand.

Related: Lin Tianmiao: Making art through sickness, life and play | Yokohama Triennale, Lu Xun’s ‘Wild Grass’ and our lives