Since 2012, the Shanghai Biennale has been housed at the Power Station of Art, a hulking industrial relic with a chimney that mirrors the city’s teetering skyline. This year was no different, although the title of the exhibition – Does the Flower Hear the Bee? – conjured up a slightly more natural setting than the gallery’s concrete halls, or the hazy city blocks that line the banks of the Huangpu river.

The theme was inspired by contemporary research that describes the behaviour of flowers in proximity to bees, says chief curator Kitty Scott – reportedly, the plants secrete more nectar when the insects are nearby, responding to the sound of their buzzing. The bee ‘speaks’ and the plants ‘hear’. Is it a mistake to understand nature by anthropomorphising it? The answer to that question remains unclear, but it definitely speaks to our ecological moment, which encourages us to decenter the human and consider the perspectives of other living beings, from animals and mushrooms, to flowers and trees.

Scott also points out a resonance between the flower and the bee, and artists themselves – how they “listen to” life as it unfolds. “It’s a beautiful way to think about the way artists are working today, and how they’re attuning themselves to the world,” she says. More specifically, it suggests a kind of “attention to the senses” that yields “tactile information” about the world around us (as opposed to the “dry” information of science and technology). At its best, she suggests, this kind of intuitive art can help us to “move into the future more equipped for what’s coming”.

The Biennale comes at this central theme from many different angles. Some artworks meditate on the tangled relationships between humans, animals, and machines; others showcase Indigenous forms of knowledge that we draw upon as we “try to understand our relationship with the land”. Some – like Haegue Yang’s monumental installation of multicoloured venetian blinds, which makes use of the power station’s towering height – view things through the lens of migration, exploring different modes of “listening” and creative expression that can exist across cultures.

Below, we list ten highlights.

AKI INOMATA, HOW TO CARVE A SCULPTURE (2018-ONGOING)

To create the titular sculptures, Inomata dropped a few pieces of wood into beaver enclosures at five zoos across Japan, where the animals instinctively gnawed on the material, chipping bits away and leaving behind their tooth marks. The Japanese artist treats these beavers as a kind of collaborator (although it’s hard to say whether the beavers would agree). As part of the ‘collaboration’, Inomata also exhibits oversized replicas of the beavers’ work, created with the help of human sculptors or using a high-tech CNC cutting machine. Put together, the works raise timely questions about authorship, artistic purpose, and non-human creativity. Like: as machines become more autonomous, will we begin to think of them as artistic collaborators? What about the longhorn beetles that tunneled through the wood from the inside? Should we call them artists too?

SARA CWYNAR, BABY BLUE BENZO (2024)

Over the course of this eclectic, 21-minute film, the Canadian artist Sara Cwynar manages to bring together Charli xcx, Sigmund Freud, insomnia and benzodiazepines, Pamela Anderson, Toni Morrison, professional ice skating, Rachel Cusk, Virginia Woolf, booming bass, Timothy Morton, METZ, and the most expensive car ever sold – the Mercedes-Benz 300SLR, sold for €135 million in 2022. As the artist explains it, it’s a film about the surrealism at the heart of late capitalism, where we live in a perpetual dream state of endless images, information, and advertising (in which artists themselves are complicit). Ironically, the only time we can escape this stream of content is when we actually go to sleep, but that’s unlikely to happen during this bass-heavy fever dream.

FRANCIS ALŸS, CHILDREN’S GAMES (1999-2025)

In Mexico, children play a version of hockey with a burning ball, which symbolises a dance or battle between cosmic forces. Another child seems to fly as he rings a heavy bell, his trainers lifting off the ground with each swing. In Denmark, pairs of children dance around a park, suspending a piece of fruit between their foreheads. The scenes in Alÿs’s Children’s Games are often surreal but represent decades of research into real games and rituals, where children become the protagonists and the viewer enters into their imaginative, daredevil universe.

LIU SHUAI, SLIDE, THEN SOAR! (2025)

This year’s Biennale spills out of the Power Station of Art via its City Project at the Jia Yuan Hai art museum on the outskirts of Shanghai, as well as the boutique, exhibition space, and artist residency VILLA tbh. Both feature work by Liu Shuai, with the latter hosting a collection of playful sculptures and experimental instruments. Suspended from the ceiling, a network of bamboo and other materials from the villa’s garden becomes a four-person wind instrument, while leaves are transformed into flying kites, and mushrooms glow in the dark behind a peephole. More fun art, please!

SHAO CHUN, TWINLAND (2025)

Over the past few years, we’ve seen many brands mine the viral phenomenon of ASMR to shape our habits and desires. Shao Chun taps into this “alluring, yet manipulative” cannibalisation of culture with an installation that combines found audio and video from the internet with hanging sculptures and textiles. Smushed together, the satisfying sounds take on an eerie, repulsive edge, while the physical sculptures take on the shape of a “cyber spirit” conjured up from the digital realm.

CHENG XINHAO, STRATUMS & ERRATICS (2023-2024)

Stratums & Erratics is a 71-minute film about a man kicking a rock down the road. I promise that’s much more compelling than it sounds. Beginning in 2023, the artist set off from Kunming, China, while kicking a stone, travelling toward the China-Burma border along roads with a historical significance. After 41 days and some 800 kilometres of walking – plus some unexpected injuries and setbacks – Cheng Xinhao arrived at the destination, still kicking the same stone, although it had now become a smooth pebble. As the rest of the world accelerates, this slow mode of travelling takes on a rebellious dimension. That said, the film can also get the heart pumping a little faster, especially when the artist reaches urban areas, where a bad kick or a stray lorry could send the rock flying, never to be seen again.

DAN ER, GREETINGS NO. 9 (2024)

The Chinese artist Dan Er has been making art about the culture of Xinjiang – a beautiful but politically fraught region in the country’s north-west – since 2016. In this silent, black-and-white recording, she performs a traditional Uyghur dance, “Picking Grapes”, associated with the city of Turpan, an oasis city which is famous for its vineyards. Through movement, the artist says, she tries to capture the textures and emotions that often get lost when cultures collide.

KIM ADAMS, ARRIVED, FORMERLY KNOWN AS PIG MOUNTAIN (2014-2025)

The Canadian sculptor Kim Adams has been working on the artwork formerly titled Pig Mountain for many years. The gigantic artwork (a moss-covered boulder made of faux rock) is populated by hundreds of miniatures, many of them feral pigs, who cross ravines on spindly bridges. But gradually, humans, too, have been taking over this work-in-progress. “I started adding them to see what would happen,” the artist says. And, as usual, we came along and messed things up. Today, the mountain is at a tipping point, not so much a romantic vision of nature as a rowdy holiday camp for hikers, campers, and other tourists – a testament to the havoc we wreak on the natural world.

ALVARO BARRINGTON, LOVE SHACK - MOUNTAIN AND SEA, SHANGHAI (2025)

Three paintings occupy Alvaro Barrington’s Love shack, each depicting the sun setting over the Caribbean sea. These slow moments of mundane beauty might seem out-of-place in a cavernous power station in hyper-modern Shanghai, if not for the titular shack made of reclaimed wood and corrugated roofing, that houses them. Equipped with a boombox and rocks refashioned as seating, the space-within-a-space offers a place to momentarily rest and reflect, inspired by the artist’s return to his childhood home of Grenada.

HO TZU NYEN, TIMEPIECES (2023)

The animations in Timepieces span 43 flatscreens of various sizes, ranging from crackling fires, snoozing cats, and lazy rivers, to zombies, clockwork, and an anxiety-inducing bomb countdown. The timescales of each work also vary wildly, from one second to – theoretically – 165 years, or the amount of time it takes for Neptune to make a full revolution around the Sun. Through these looping images, the artist asks how can we come to terms with such a vast difference in timescales, all of which exist simultaneously and have more or less tangible impact on our lives.

The 15th Shanghai Biennale is on show until March 31, 2026