The Taipei event is, however, attempting to buck the trend of bigger, newer and more expensive. To this effect, curators Hongjohn Lin and Tirdad Zolghadr have done things that are just not done: they invited a small number of artists - only 24 - and a third of those are repeats from the previous biennial. They have also invited both artists and outside groups to create works that will critique the biennial even as it happens.

'It can be terrifying,' says Zolghadr, an Iranian-born curator and art critic based in Berlin.

Still, he believes these steps are necessary in order to ask, as he did in his curator's statement: 'What can you do with a biennial that you cannot do with anything else?'

As you enter the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the first work you encounter is an area for home-brewing beer, where workshops are conducted every other week, based on instructions from the Superflex Collective in Denmark.

A little further along, you encounter Hong Kong artist Pak Sheung-chuen sitting in a chair next to a sign that reads: 'Let the artist go home with you.' And his project is simply that: on 23 days of the exhibition, he will go home with a museum visitor.

Then you get to the exhibition's cornerstone, the Google Office, a wide-open area created by London-born artist Olivia Plender that contains a couple of computers, a printer, a table football game and a discussion zone where discussions and performances will take place almost every day this month.

'If it blurs the distinctions between artwork, biennial and social space then that's fantastic,' says Zolghadr.

Natalie Hsu, a staffer at the Google Office information desk, however, hints that the lack of identifiable art has left some visitors confused. 'The most common question I get is: 'Where is the Taipei Biennial?'' she says. Then after that, it's 'What is this exhibition about?'

Rather than simply presenting museum visitors with works to 'view', Lin and Zolghadr hope to engage viewers in a person-to-person fashion where possible.

Pak's Go Home Project is one of the more successful examples. The artist says: 'Some people tell me this is their dream. It has nothing to do with whether I'm famous or not. It's that they can take an artist home from the museum, and this is something they never thought they could do.'

There are also weekly salsa classes by Taiwanese artist Larry Shao, daily film screenings, and off-site happenings at independent art spaces.

This strategy is also likely related to another change biennials are facing: the rise of art fairs.

If the 1990s was the decade of the biennial, when curators had the capacity to make powerful introductions of the latest art, the 2000s was the decade of the art fair. Now it is just as common for artists to launch new work in gallery booths at fairs.

As a result, biennials have felt a need to find new ways to be experimental, and in the poor economy, this has often gone hand in hand with funding constraints passed down by their host institutions.

In this regard, one of the more piquant works displayed in Taipei is Shi Jin-hua's Auction, by which the Taiwanese artist auctioned 162 square metres of the biennial exhibition space to a local art gallery. The price was just under NT$700,000 (HK$171,000), and this is the biennial's only real section for nice-looking wall hangers, which look strangely out of place.

The irony works on many levels. Galleries paying their way into museum shows and buying prestige for their artists is a hot topic in Taipei these days, since Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang's local gallery, the Eslite Gallery, did just that in this same museum a year earlier, with the exhibition, Cai Guoqiang: Hanging Out in the Museum.

At the same time, the sale of one or a few of these pay-to-play gallery works could potentially pay for the entire Taipei Biennial.

Last month at Taiwan's biggest art fair, Art Taipei, a four-metre-long gunpowder painting by Cai sold for US$800,000. The 2010 Taipei Biennial's budget is not far off that figure, and with this kind of disparity, one can sense massive implications for the market's power to strong-arm the art world and social relations in general.

Zolghadr says through this exhibition, he'd like 'to encourage people to be more curious about these backstage factors'.

If there's a place where the Taipei Biennial succeeds, it is in pulling up the curtain and allowing the audience behind the scenes.

One problem, however, is that it is not always as fun to be backstage. In viewing this exhibition, sometimes one feels a nostalgia for powerful works that speak directly, and also a sense of dread that the curators are telling us that such works are no longer possible.

One also wonders about the reach of works that rely on viewer involvement. While Pak's Go Home Project has a wonderful symbolic layer that's fun to contemplate even if you do not take Pak home yourself - the work puts the artist and viewer on the same level - the same cannot necessarily be said of Shao's Salsa Lesson and several other works that require anecdotes to fill you in. (Shao teaches salsa to fund his art making.)

There are also indications that in its desire to explode or escape the museum, the 2010 Taipei Biennial may have overstepped its limits.

Of the 24 artists, 11 have been commissioned by the curators to expand their works over the next two years for another exhibition in 2012, with the idea of making this biennial a process rather than just a show. But the museum has said it won't support the continuing exhibition.

When asked about this over e-mail, Zolghadr replies: 'First I was afraid, I was petrified ...' And then he quoted the rest of the lyrics to Gloria Gaynor's disco anthem, 'I Will Survive'.