ArtAsiaPacific’s latest issue turns a deliberate gaze toward Southeast Asia—not as a fixed category but as a living, breathing constellation of practices, histories, and demands. Drawing from the region’s rich legacy, this edition invites readers to consider how artists, curators, and institutions are forging new paths amid the flux of globalization, identity, and place.
Our cover spotlights Amanda Heng, 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 active negotiation of difference. Flores invokes Salud Algabre, the Filipina revolutionary dressmaker whose Sakdalista uprising in the 1930s reminds us that no step toward liberation is wasted. Through the lens of practitioners such as Heng, Redza Piyadasa, and Fernando Zóbel, Flores proposes the concept of “geopoetics” which, he explains, “is not marked as a binary of opposites of geopolitics, but rather another mode of understanding how the world plays out beyond the ideological theater.”
For the issue’s second Feature, Sophia Powers looks at the evocative works of An-My Lê, whose photographs traverse contested terrains, weaving the landscapes of Vietnam and beyond into narratives of memory and migration. As Lê prepares to unveil a new body of work at A-Z West in California’s Mojave Desert, Powers surveys the artist’s 30-year career, which reminds us how the land and even celestial night skies bear witness to human stories of trauma and reconciliation.
In Up Close, we expand this conversation by highlighting Thảo Nguyên Phan’s ongoing installation project Forêt, Femme, Folie (2024– ), shown at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, which incorporates French missionary Jacque Dournes’s ethnographic documentation with the artist’s reinterpretations in watercolor. We also look at recent artworks unveiled in Hong Kong: Hu Xiaoyuan’s Carpel III (2025), a new sculpture made of marble, rosewood, and raw silk that explores the cycles of life, exhibited at David Zwirner; and Pan Daijing’s Bent (2025), a site-specific installation examining bodily presence and emotionality, shortlisted for M+ museum’s Sigg Prize this year.
In Profiles, we traveled to Bangkok to speak with Miwako Tezuka, the inaugural director of Thailand’s long-awaited, highly ambitious private museum, Dib Bangkok, which is set to open in late December. Back in Hong Kong, AAP associate editor Louis Lu met up with Ayoung Kim as she premiered her M+ Facade commission to discuss her technology-driven practice and latest projects. For Where I Work, curator Tiffany Leung visited Mella Jaarsma’s airy studio in Yogyakarta, ahead of the Dutch-born artist’s solo exhibition at Kunsthal KAdE in the Netherlands.
Elsewhere in this issue, Valerie Nikolay files a Dispatch from her hometown Chiang Mai, reflecting on its low-key vibe, attracting artists and curators from across Thailand and abroad—including Kurdish artist Rushdi Anwar and his partner, Australian curator Zoe Butt. In Essays, AAP’s Kuala Lumpur desk editor Beverly Yong delves into the work of Ilham Art Gallery in the Malaysian capital and its role in nurturing contemporary art in the country, illustrating how an institution can be a site of knowledge production as well as a space for resistance.
As new art festivals pop up all over the globe, Béatrice Grenier considers how the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah went beyond mounting a show of the latest, off-the-shelf art, opting instead to pull apart and reassemble an established canon, inviting alternative ways of seeing. Similarly, our long-form review by Kelly Ma reflects on the history of porcelain fever in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent exhibition, “Monstrous Beauty.” For Inside Burger Collection, Stuart Horodner writes a compelling essay on the transformative work of Jack Whitten, whose recent landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art signified a pivotal moment in recognizing his profound contribution to contemporary art.
Finally, for One on One, Yu Cheng-Ta reminisces about stumbling into Ming Wong’s Singapore Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, “Life of Imitation,” which is based on Douglas Sirk’s 1959 film Imitation of Life. He recalls, “Wong’s reinterpretation transposed that drama into Singapore’s multi-ethnic context, exposing an even more entangled cultural condition.” Ultimately, this issue is an invitation to embrace complexity, to move beyond reductionist frameworks, and to listen closely to the vital, nuanced voices shaping contemporary art today.
A digital edition of the full ArtAsiaPacific 146 (Nov/Dec 2025) issue is now available for purchase on Zinio, Google Play, iTunes, and Magzter.
