Launched in 1966, the Shanghai Biennale was the first event of its kind in Mainland China. During a bustling Shanghai Art Week, the Biennale unveiled plans for its 15th edition, set to open at the Power Station of Art in November of 2025 and run through March of the following year. Titled “Does the Flower Hear the Bee?”, this edition will be helmed by Canadian curator Kitty Scott, whose impressive track record includes roles at Documenta 12, the 2018 Liverpool Biennale and the Canadian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. Scott has also served as chief curator at the National Gallery of Canada, curator of Modern and Contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario and chief curator at London’s Serpentine Galleries. She will be the first woman to lead the Shanghai Biennale since its inception—a milestone that’s long overdue—but curiously, despite the breadth of her career, Scott’s involvement with the Shanghai or Chinese art scene has been limited to a few lectures in recent years.
On an unusually warm fall day, she stood on the terrace of Shanghai’s Sheraton Plaza and explained that the open theme will embrace a range of interpretations while nonetheless addressing some of civilization’s most pressing questions. At the brunch following her presentation, Scott told Observer that the title came from her reflections on nature and the hidden systems of communication all around us. Studies, she’d explained during her speech, reveal that flowers ‘hear’ bees and, in response, produce a sweeter nectar to welcome them. As Scott put it, “we have long known that when bees gather, they communicate and share knowledge with each other. We are only just recognizing that this network of communication extends even further… It turns out that flowers, too, are gathering information, and we now appreciate that they hear the vibration of honeybee wings.”
The 15th Shanghai Biennale will explore new forms of sensory communication between artworks, fostering dialogue and harmony with other intelligences, from animals to plants. “Artworks provide us with a privileged space for doing so in an embodied and interconnected way, forming stronger bonds within and between communities and in harmony with a more than human world,” Scott said, envisioning viewers as flowers, attuned to the myriad forms of life and intelligence surrounding them.
Scott also highlighted Shanghai’s unique position as “an urban space defined by the meeting of distinct and sometimes clashing cultures,” making it an ideal venue to explore the multi-perspectivism necessary to address the most significant challenges our society is facing today. The Biennale’s artist selection will span local and global perspectives while specifically focusing on Indigenous artists as carriers of alternative forms of knowledge. She’s already working with a team of primarily local curators, and while there’s still much to be done, Scott clarified during our conversation that the selection process will ensure that regional voices resonate alongside international ones.
The dialectic tension between craft and nature and how handcrafted objects act as vessels of cultural memory and identity, transcending nationality or politics and linking humans in a shared need for expression, is one of the Biennale’s core themes. Scott extended this idea to modern technology, including A.I., which she described as the latest evolution in a continuum of human creativity. “All human skill, no matter how abstract, originates in bodily practice and, at the deepest level, in the knowledge conveyed through the touch and movement of the hand,” she said. Yet, the Biennale also aims to challenge the outdated notion of human monopoly on communication, urging us to recognize “a wider network of communicative agents collectively shaping the world.”
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In this spirit, the Biennale aims to reconnect us with an older notion of techne, one far from today’s digital and monistic alienation, that is instead a form of making that strengthens the bond between mind and craft—a reminder of the deeply embodied nature of human experience. According to Scott, “the craft of making physical things provides insight into techniques of experience that can shape our dealings with others.”
Through a focus on multiculturalism, interspecies relations, and indigenous knowledge, Scott envisions a Biennale that, in her words, “could contribute to the great task of the present, rebuilding a culture of excess, a culture accessible everywhere and for everyone.” In the tradition of thinkers like Eduard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, the 15th Shanghai Biennale will explore a vision of humanity in harmony with other forms of intelligence, training viewers to recognize the delicate symphonies on which our existence depends.
The 15th Shanghai Biennale will open on November 8, 2025. Additional details will be revealed in the following months.
