Innehållsförteckning för 146 (Nov/Dec 2025) från ArtAsiaPacific

This issue of ArtAsiaPacific turns a deliberate gaze toward Southeast Asia—not as a fixed category but as a living, breathing constellation of practices, histories, and critical demands. Drawing from the region’s rich legacy, this edition invites us to consider how artists, curators, and institutions are forging new paths amid the flux of globalization, identity, and place. We begin with Amanda Heng’s invitation to the public to walk with her, and whose practice is discussed in Patrick Flores’s manifesto “To Curate a Region.” His proposal is more than a call for contextual sensitivity—it is a blueprint for a curatorial ethics grounded in respect for local knowledge, political complexity, and the active negotiation of difference. Flores invokes Salud Algabre, the Filipina revolutionary dressmaker whose Sakdalista uprising in the 1930s reminds us that…

In a time of global instability, Chiang Mai, once the capital of the Lanna kingdom, moves at a different cadence. While “slow city” is not an official slogan, the label sticks. Rice fields, traditional craft communities, and temples bleeding into the geometry of traffic roundabouts evoke a sense of timelessness. Meditation and forms of selfinquiry—increasingly central to the region’s tourism—are deeply intertwined with local culture and modes of artmaking. This rhythm, shaped by history and landscape, sets the stage for a distinct flavor of artistic practices. When I visited artist Ubatsat’s studio inside the temple Wat Umong Suan Putthatham, I sensed a profound connection between ritual and form. While sharing how he begins and ends his day with the chants of temple monks, he was working on the painting Burmica…

In the last few decades, American and European higher education institutions have spent much energy dismantling canons safeguarded in their curricula. Cornerstone texts that have heretofore established methodological bases for discussion are contested by students and professors alike in favor of fostering a more comprehensive cultural memory. Likewise, museums and other art establishments have seemingly embarked on a quest to tear down deeply entrenched cultural biases, mining their collections to present forgotten or disregarded narratives in order to better (and morally) represent a global majority. While deconstruction is a valid intellectual enterprise, it has left the art world at a loss in terms of a common ground on which to imagine alternative ways of seeing. In this cultural framework, the second edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah raised…

SEOUL The fourth edition of Frieze Seoul, held in collaboration with longstanding homegrown art fair Kiaf (Korea International Art Fair), took place from September 3–7. The mood was subdued but steady, fueled by the quiet energy of collective hustle that emerged from renewed national stability after South Korea’s politically and economically turbulent year. Attendance was on par with 2024 (Frieze: 121 exhibitors, 70,000 visitors; Kiaf: 175 exhibitors, 80,000 visitors) but demographics shifted. Some 40 galleries had not returned to Frieze Seoul, including international players Michael Werner, Karma, and Sadie Coles HQ; in their place, the percentage of Asian galleries rose to 64 percent—up from 48 percent in 2024 and 35 percent in 2023 and 2022. First-time participants to Frieze Seoul (but not Kiaf) included Tokyo’s Ota Fine Arts, Hong Kong’s…

On ILHAM Gallery’s 10th anniversary, a lively crowd gathered for the launch of its latest exhibition, “Menggodam,” named after the Malay word for “hacking.” The show featured nine artists who (mis)appropriate various technologies in surprising ways. Curators Gunalan Nadarajan and Roopesh Sitharan described menggodam as “the cultural ingenuity of reprogramming to execute one’s own program,” highlighting contexts in Asia where “creative reconfiguring and vernacular appropriation not only point to culturally located ways of making, but in fact posit strategies for shortcircuiting the closures and exclusionary logic of hardware, systems, and infrastructures, especially those inherited from outside these cultures.” Haris Abadi’s Open Source <Plant Your Own Tree> (2018) neatly exemplified this approach by using IKEA products to craft a Pohon Beringin—a representation of the “Tree of Life” in traditional Malay cultural…

Thinking about Southeast Asia as a region takes us initially to a geographical necessity: the sketching out of a surface on which the silhouette of a place and culture begins to appear. Here, the much-maligned monster of anthropology of an earlier imperialism curiously offers an instructive prompt. I am reminded of the late American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who once asked, “What is a country if it is not a nation? What is a culture if it is not a consensus?”1 To which I add, “What is a region if it is not a curation?” If a region is a curation, then what are the possible ways in which Southeast Asia is curated as a location and a historical imagination? Expressed in another way, what does an exhibition on, around, and…

Hu Xiaoyuan’s Carpel III (2025) is austere in form, unassuming in stature, yet quietly lethal. A rosewood branch juts out from a block of chiseled marble, morphing halfway into a thin mesh tube meticulously crafted from xiao, or raw silk—the artist’s signature material. As the stiffly ascending branch flows into the suppler, more pliable descent of the semi-transparent tube, its concise curvature summons a whip settling after a strike. At its apex, where wood meets xiao, perches another xiao structure—the hollow, ghostly echo of the marble block below. Exquisite, ethereal, fragile as a breath, its wraithlike form commands a stately, even ominous presence, embodying the delicate violence of a soap bubble still attached to a wand—poised either to lift off, or burst. Carpel III, created for David Zwirner’s 2025 group…

Travel has long been an important inspiration for Yoshitomo Nara’s work, and Taiwan—given its proximity to the celebrated artist’s native Japan, as well as the historical ties between both island nations—seems like a natural locale to return to again and again. Nara’s presentation at Meta Space, “Traveling with Hazy Humid Day,” was the fourth stop in a 10-year touring exhibition across Taiwan, which started in 2023 at Kaohsiung’s Newei Arts Center. The show took place in Jinguashi, a former mining town in New Taipei City, unfolding across four floors in a former seaside Taiwan Power Company building now overgrown with lush plants. Here, visitors encountered Nara’s paintings, drawings, and ceramics against the scenic backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, with multiple windows offering coastal views that were especially poignant, as the…

How can war trauma be imagined in the scope of the universe and its myriad galaxies? Can historical pain be measured in the stars? The work of An-My Lê suggests a trajectory from this most intimate of human experience to the ineffable mystery and grandeur of the heavens over a diverse practice of more than 30 years. Lê uses a large-format wooden Deardorff field camera to interrogate traces of war on the landscape and the human psyche. Born in Saigon in 1960, the artist and her family were evacuated by the American government when Lê was 15 years old. She returned to her motherland in 1994, when the US lifted its trade embargo on the country, beginning her first major photographic series Vietnam, which she developed over four years until…

Photography is a crucial medium in the realm of visual politics. The camera, hailed as a tool that could capture reality in its purest, truest form, was dutifully employed by 20th-century Western anthropologists during their travels to record “foreign” cultures under the guise of scientific objectivity. Yet these pictorial methods were far from neutral, often operating through a racialized, Othering lens that manufactured and upheld the imperial imagination, leaving no room for complexity. In her practice spanning video, installation, and painting, Ho Chi Minh City-born artist Thảo Nguyên Phan seeks to unearth alternative histories within the legacy of French colonization in Vietnam as well as regional folklore. Rather than emphasize a singular truth or dismantle dominant narratives, her aim is to expand cultural memory beyond just coded, hierarchical representations—an endeavor…

Summer group shows are hit or miss—often a last gasp after a full season of carefully orchestrated exhibitions and the peripatetic global circuit of art fairs. But on rare occasions, they can offer refreshing and inventive curatorial ideas, not only showcasing young talent but also striving for something we might deem “poetic.” At ShanghART West Bund Central, the exhibition “Conversation with the Stone,” its title and curatorial theme inspired by a poem by Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012), showcased works by 14 artists across various mediums—painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. The show coincided with the gallery’s first anniversary in its new space, which opened last August following the demolition of its original West Bund location. Now in closer proximity to The Long Museum, the new gallery, designed by architectural…

Upon entering the dark gallery space of Kohesi Initiatives in Yogyakarta, visitors encountered a pair of seemingly shattered paintings which opened Indonesian artist Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo’s solo exhibition “Terra Nova: Bentang Lain (Other Scapes).” Aptly titled Fissura and Fissura #2 (both 2025), these earth-toned works feature volcanic ash from Mount Merapi, palm oil charcoal, and coal, overlain with large shards of resin that create a fractured surface. Sunaryo is long known for his distinctive technique of painting with pigments derived from ash, mud, soil, coffee grounds, and more. Unlike conventional paint, such organic ingredients requires intense precision in its handling, which imbues his works with a dynamic immediacy and motion that recalls cosmic fusion processes—a source of energy for stars, including our sun. “Terra Nova” presented more than 20 new…

The Almaty Museum of Arts, Central Asia’s first major private contemporary art museum, opened in September with an Almagul Menlibayeva retrospective. Titled “I Understand Everything” and curated by Gridthiya Gaweewong, the show offered a sweeping survey of three decades of artistic evolution. After leaving Kazakhstan in the early 2000s, Menlibayeva built her reputation through exhibitions across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, resulting in her work circulating more widely in global contexts than within Kazakhstan itself. Menlibayeva’s journey from the underground art collective Green Triangle in late Soviet Almaty to international recognition parallels Kazakhstan’s own complex navigation of post-socialist identity. The exhibition’s chronological structure revealed this trajectory, beginning with her early textile works and grattage paintings that emerged from material scarcity and ideological constraint. Her choice of textiles over painting…

In 2009, still a graduate student, I found myself—quite unexpectedly—participating in the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale alongside many established artists. For someone far too young, as I was then, entering the international art world wasn’t about any hunger to “be seen.” It was more like being completely immersed in learning. Witnessing artists from everywhere, at every stage of their career became, for me, an irreplaceable form of enlightenment. I still vividly recall one particular night after the opening. Artist Jun Yang was leading me through the streets of Venice. All of us—artists from around the world—talking deep into the night. Near Piazza San Marco, he suddenly said: “Come on! Let’s go to the Singapore Pavilion, my artist friend will let us in!” So there we were, sneaking through…

The global art market continues its multiyear downturn. In October, the Financial Times reported that Hauser & Wirth’s UK profits plunged nearly 90 percent last year, with revenues dropping from USD 193.2 million in 2023 to USD 91.7 million in 2024. Fellow mega gallery David Zwirner’s UK pre-tax profits also fell by almost 90 percent, underscoring the severity of the contraction in one of the world’s key art markets. Both galleries attributed the sharp decline primarily to a steep fall in secondary-market sales. The summer of 2025 saw a wave of prominent gallery closures, most notably Blum and Clearing. In early October, Almine Rech shuttered its London location in Mayfair after 11 years, putting its UK business into voluntary liquidation. The move was described as a lease restructuring but nevertheless…

Five years ago, as the world was gripped by Covid, Asia’s first livestreamed auctions of modern and contemporary art at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in fall 2020 realized a combined total of HKD 3.4 billion (USD 437 million). The following season, at the height of the market (in Asia especially, which accounted for approximately 40 percent of 2021 global sales volume), the number topped HKD 4.2 billion (USD 544.1 million). Fast forward to September 2025: Hong Kong’s inaugural marquee auction week—a milestone that saw the three international houses going head-to-head for the first time, holding their sales at their respective newly established Asia headquarters—concluded with little fanfare, generating an aggregate of HKD 1.5 billion (USD 190.6 million) (note: if not specified as hammer price, sale amounts and totals include auction fees,…

When describing a mood, we often draw on the lexicon of bodily movement—“sinking” into melancholy, “falling” in love. Our inner landscapes seem inseparable from our physical gestures and the spaces we inhabit. Rainer Maria Rilke recognized this connection, coining the term Weltinnenraum “world-inner-space” to express how our experiences of the external world invites us into an inner realm of emotion. As his 1914 poem declares, “almost all things beckon us to feeling.” Since 2015, Berlin-based artist Pan Daijing has continuously explored the relationships between body, affect, and space. Working across sound, video, performance, and installation, she transforms architectural environments into psychological terrains where the fleeting and contradictory nature of human sentiments—intimacy and unease, tenderness and threat, love and its inevitable pain—converge and take form. Pan’s Bent (2025), a new installation…

Over the last three decades, Lee Bul’s sculptural oeuvre has aesthetically and intellectually delved into humanity’s failures. For the South Korean artist, our dazzling dreams and collective aspirations always come back to us as cautionary ruins, revealing how the aspirations of modernity inevitably dissolve into melancholic remnants of what we have lost or never achieved. To quote historian David Lowenthal: “Relics, histories, and memories suffuse human experience…. Noticed or ignored, cherished or spurned, the past is omnipresent.” This sentiment pervaded Lee’s major retrospective at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, “Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now,” a joint curatorial effort with Hong Kong’s M+ Museum, which gathered more than 150 works across sculpture, installation, drawing, and maquette. Tracing her early works to the present day, the exhibition was more…

Stepping into “Tidal Weavers: Islands Exchange” was like entering a village bazaar in which kaleidoscopic sights and cacophonic sounds converge. The group exhibition was built on reciprocal artist exchanges lasting four to eight weeks between grassroots organizations across Hong Kong, Indonesia, Taiwan, and the Philippines. A map at the entrance traced these exchanges, evoking historic maritime trade systems and diasporas. Curated by Ade Darmawan, the show presented a south-to-south, ground-up dialogue that gave artists the time and space to reclaim ancient networks and become acquainted with island neighbors across the sea. During his residency with art collective Susur Galur in Pontianak, West Kalimantan, Yip Kai Chun, a Hong Kong artist of Hakka descent, documented the tatung festival that marks the end of the Chinese new year. In My Deity Wants…

During the American war in Vietnam, the US military employed a slew of underhanded tactics, one of which was Operation Wandering Soul. This lyrically code-named campaign involved broadcasting voice recordings engineered to simulate fallen Việt Cộng soldiers crying out to their living comrades, creating an echo chamber of disembodied shrieks and moans—a ghastly ruse that exploited regional superstitions about spirits of lost or unburied dead, forever doomed to roam the earth. Such remote methods of combat, intended to unnerve the enemy through an intangible psychological assault on the senses, underpinned Sung Tieu and Ho Rui An’s duo exhibition at the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. Titled “On-Air, Off-Air” in reference to the transmission of radio or TV programs, the show gathered works across installation, video, and photography to explore…