Asia NOW is a curated art fair that amplifies the artistic voices of Asia and its diaspora.
Following a successful first decade, Asia NOW, firmly rooted in both the local and international art scenes, affirms its ambition to “transcend the borders—real or imagined—that have long defined East and West.” This perspective is further enriched by Leela Gandhi’s research on new forms of empathetic collaboration, what she defines as “affective communities”, as highlighted by curator Anissa Touati, an expert in Global South dynamics.
Asia Without Borders
Asia NOW seeks to challenge established perspectives, amplify quieter voices, and open a space where Asia is more than a geography, but a methodology, a movement. The fair continues to explore the “blind spots” of traditional fairs that often function merely as incubators. Artistic communities from Dhaka, Lahore, Kathmandu, Colombo, as well as AlUla and Sharjah, are asserting themselves as new nerve centers of contemporary art through the growth of their art scenes and biennials. It is essential to reflect this evolution through a new fair model that operates more like a festival.
Long relegated to the margins of “Asian” programming—cultural ecosystems designated as the Middle East or “West Asia” elsewhere in the world, including Istanbul, Riyadh, AlUla, Bahrain, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, and Doha— these regions no longer merely emerge they assert themselves with increasing rigor and are becoming established references. In this spirit, Asia NOW 2025 resolutely places West Asia at the heart of its programming, affirming a vision of plural and global “Asias.”
Curatorial Platform
Under the evocative title Grow, the 2025 edition of Asia NOW articulates a vision of art as a fertile ground for transformation, dialogue, and collective flourishing. Grow becomes a framework through which we engage with the shifting landscapes of identity, culture, and belonging, urging us to move beyond the constraints of geographical, historical, and cultural binaries.
At the heart of this edition lies an invitation to reflect on how perceptions take shape, expand, and alter the way we encounter each other in an increasingly fluid world. Grow calls attention to the transformative potential of art—its capacity to plant seeds of empathy, to germinate connections across difference, and to cultivate the imagination required for new modes of living together.
Aligned with Leela Gandhi’s evocative concept of “affective communities,” Asia NOW 2025 foregrounds the fragile, often understated gestures through which bonds of solidarity and friendship emerge. Gandhi reminds us that communities are not forged solely through shared origins or histories, but through unexpected affinities and ethical attachments that cross cultural divides. An artist working with material from their ancestral soil, for instance, may encounter a viewer from another geography who recognizes in that gesture the light of their own memory—whether tied to earth, craft, or ritual. In this moment, an affective community takes root: not grounded in sameness, but in a resonance that links distinct origins through shared sensibility. These affective threads—woven through acts of sharing, listening, and remembering—become essential sites of ethical and aesthetic engagement.
Positioned prominently within the fair’s framework is the recognition of the Global Majority as both presence and horizon. This approach deliberately places West Asia and South Asia at the core of programming, recognizing that regions once considered “peripheries” are now vital, dynamic forces reshaping contemporary discourse.
“It’s a fair that feels like a festival. It’s what art should be. It’s a celebration! ” X Zhu-Nowell, Director and Chief Curator Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), Shanghai
“It is about drawing the world a little bit closer to each other.” Nour Aslam, Founder and executive director Art South Asia Project.
Gallery Sections
Asia NOW 2025 will host around 70 confirmed international galleries. Among the participants are returning galleries such as Esther Schipper (Berlin, Paris, New York City, Seoul), carlier | gebauer (Berlin), Sabrina Amrani (Madrid), Yeo Workshop (Singapore), Nika Project Space (Dubai, Paris), Kaikaikiki (Tokyo), Gallery Side 2 (Tokyo), Galerie BAO (Paris), and O Art Space (Lahore), Tang Contemporary Art (Beijing, Hong Kong, Bangkok), A2Z Art Gallery (Paris), BAO (paris), Cuturi Gallery (Singapore), HdM (Beijing).
This year, new galleries joining the fair for the first time include Arario Gallery (Seoul), Regeneration Art Gallery (Tashkent), Baik Art (Los Angeles/Seoul/Jakarta), GALLERY 2 (Seoul/ Jeju Island), and Capsule (Shanghai) KLEMM’S(Berlin) and Stems Gallery (Brussels, Paris).
Now On
A section dedicated to young galleries (founded after 2015) participate for the first or second time, spotlighting the vitality of emerging art scenes. Participants include Gallery2 (Seoul), IAH Gallery (Seoul), Galerie Prima (Paris), Galerie PJ (Metz), Wilhelmina’s (Hydra).
The Thirds Space* NEW
This year, Asia NOW inaugurates The Third Space, a new section dedicated to experimental works embracing hybridity, collaboration between galleries, and the generative potential that arises when perspectives intersect.
•We Were Always Neighbors, curated by Sahil Arora, founder of Method Art Space, (Mumbai) with Rajiv Menon Contemporary Gallery (Los Angeles, USA)
•Brought together by Lê Thiên-Bào, founding director of Galerie Bao (Paris), this presentation features installations and works by Ingahee Gallery (Seoul).
•HATCH Gallery of Iranian artist Laila Tara H, featuring two kaftan-shaped works in fabric and paper, paired with a sound piece that transforms the installation into a place of memory, inheritance, and delicate resonance.
•Metis Art (Singapore) and Jamie QQ Wu present self-taught Indonesian painter Nani Wijaya
•Sorry We’re Closed (Brussels) presenting Natsuko Uchino, nominated for the Matsutani prize.
•Third Born (Mexico City) presents Jungwon Jay Hur, featuring a large-scale paper scroll installation that explores dualities, cycles of reflection, and transformation, inviting viewers to engage with the intangible and elusive sensations of life.
Public Program
Unfolding across La Monnaie de Paris during the fair, Asia NOW’s curated program of installations, performances, screenings, and conversations brings West Asia and South Asia to the forefront, featuring major contributions from international institutions, foundations, art centers, and gallery-supported artists.
For this edition, Asia NOW platforms multiple voices, embracing the richness that emerges when diverse perspectives take root together. A chorus of curators and institutions will shape the public program across La Monnaie de Paris.
Among them: John Tain curator of the Lahore Biennale 2024, Natasha Ginwala Artistic Director of COLOMBOSCOPE, Curator of Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry, and Hajra Haider Guest Curator of COLOMBOSCOPE Festival 2026; Anissa Touati, Researcher at Brown University, USA, Curator of the Biennale BCK in Greece; and Arnaud Morand, Independent Curator; Head of Arts AFALULA.
FOCUS ON West Asia PUBLIC PROGRAM
As the art world’s compass continues to tilt, “Asia” is no longer a one-size-fits-all concept stretching neatly from Tokyo to Tehran. This year, Asia NOW invites us to rethink our directional assumptions with the theme My East is Your West—a playful and poignant nod to the cultural relativity of geography. West Asia—more commonly referred to as the Middle East—has stepped into a new discursive and curatorial spotlight. From Beirut to Riyadh, Dubai to Ramallah, the region’s cultural ecosystems are asserting engagement on their own terms. What was once considered a “periphery” is actively reconfiguring the map, reminding us that cultural gravity rarely respects cartographic conventions.
In this spirit, Asia NOW 2025 extends an open invitation to engage with adjacent geographies—bringing West Asia into sharper focus as an integral and generative part of the conversation. This curatorial gesture resists rigid regionalism, instead treating Asia as a mutable paradigm: philosophical rather than purely geographic, plural rather than monolithic. In this post-Western moments, where contemporary art’s traditional centers are increasingly decentered—the fair turns its attention toward more agile, hybrid, and often grassroots-led initiatives across the Middle East. Rather than echoing the familiar narrative of mega-infrastructure and state-driven spectacle, the spotlight here is on the porous, the emergent, and the in-between.
The Saudi Visual Arts Commission (Saudi Arabia)
Adding a performative dimension to the fair, Saudi artist Ahaad Alamoudi will present a recurring activation titled “Ghosts of Today and Tomorrow”. Engaging with sound and light as vectors of memory and transmission, Alamoudi’s work explores perception, heritage, and the temporal friction between the contemporary and the ancestral, punctuating the fair with moments of sensorial disruption and reflection.
The Saudi Visual Arts Commission will present a discursive platform reflecting on experimental models of artistic practice and programming across West and East Asia. Their approach will consider the intersections of public and private, institutional and informal, commercial and nonprofit— a critical look at how ecosystems of art are being reshaped by new kinds of infrastructure, exchange, and cultural logic.
AFALULA (Saudi Arabia)
“Under the Aegis of the Moon,” a commissioned project by Chinese artist Han Mengyun and curated by Arnaud Morand, will be presented by the French Agency for AlUla Development (AFALULA). This performative installation weaves together poetry and video to evoke the quiet majesty of the moon. Structured around a sequence of poems that unfold in tandem with the lunar rise, the work pays homage to the night as a space of reflection, intuition, and revelation. It foregrounds the sincerity of poetic expression as something that demands presence, vulnerability, and aliveness. This poetic proposition is deeply rooted in the artist’s experience during a research residency in AlUla, where landscape, silence, and time coalesced as sources of creative clarity.
Mohammed Al Faraj (Saudi Arabia)
Will transform the entrance of the Monnaie enveloping each column in prints of palm trees echoing the landscape of his native Al Hasa.
Pascal Hachem (Lebanon)
With special thanks to Alserkal (UAE) Hachem presents The Cut Line, a performance centered on the idea of “growing memory.” Revisiting the notion of community, the work explores how memory is shaped through absence, rupture, and the everyday object. The installation-performance voices different memories and lives. It goes beyond a simple cut, embodying a dormant gesture of the reality we are part of. Yet by pushing the limits, it reveals how obvious what we are watching truly is. We are part of a whole—our identities and actions intertwined with the world around us.
The project is presented by Alserkal Advisory, a multidisciplinary cultural consultancy of alternative thinkers, researchers, and specialists with extensive global knowledge and networks in the arts and culture sector.
FOCUS ON South Asia PUBLIC PROGRAM
The Lahore Biennale Foundation (Pakistan)
Lahore Biennale Foundation presents a selection of works from Of Mountains and Seas, the third edition of its biennial, curated by John Tain. The project brings together artists from Pakistan and beyond to highlight the leading role the country—alongside others across the continent, most vulnerable to the climate crisis—can play in helping societies adapt through the wealth of local and indigenous knowledge.
On view in the Monnaie de Paris are works by Hamra Abbas, Feroza Hakim, Mella Jaarsma, Imran Qureshi, Fazal Rizvi, and a performance by Abuzar Madhu, which present a vision of ecological awareness from Asian perspectives.
Powered by the French Embassy to Pakistan, with in-kind support from PIA.
Colomboscope (Sri Lanka)
Reenactments of Lost Rhythms is a constellation of activations that hold narratives of being and becoming. Anchoring traditions and infrastructures while attending to ruptures, the series unfolds through dialogue, performance, screening, and a sonic visual interlude that draws upon embodied knowledges to articulate new languages of resistance and alliance-building.
Deeply resonant with the thematic directions of the ninth edition of Colomboscope, the program brings together artistic positions previously nurtured by the festival alongside new ones anchored in the upcoming edition. The program presented by Colomboscope (Contemporary arts festival and creative platform for interdisciplinary dialogue within the cultural landscape of Colombo) features a presentation and conversation with Hajra Haider Karrar and Basir Mahmood, a performance by Chathuri Nissansala, a screening by Subas Tamang, and a sonic interlude by Rahema Zaheer.
Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India)
In partnership with the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Shwetal Patel and Nikhil Chopra (curator of its sixth edition) join a session moderated by Patel to discuss the upcoming edition, “For the Time Being,” and its layered reflections on temporality and place.
A video program curated by Shwetal Patel.
ART & FARMING
91.530 Le Marais (France)
Monnaies du sol, trames de mémoire curated by 91.530 Le Marais (Centre d’art – Val-Saint-Germain), powered by Soilonic.
Désiré Moheb-Zandi and Marion Flament present a collaborative installation exploring cycles of transformation—from earth to fiber, from barter to currency, from object to memory. Moheb-Zandi’s suspended mural weaves hemp, hand-spun wool, natural dyes, and recycled threads, reflecting traditional practices within a contemporary, ecological framework.
Below, Flament creates a mound of earth and red stones embedded with metal objects, questioning the foundations of value and circulation of wealth. Together, the works form a spatial dialogue: vertical layers of transmitted knowledge meet horizontal sedimentation of human and economic memory, offering an expanded understanding of currency as ecological, anthropological, and symbolic.
PERFORMANCES
Mella Jaarsma (Netherlands, Indonesia)
Mella Jaarsma presents a performance known for her complex costume installations and her focus on forms of cultural and racial diversity embedded within clothing, the body, and food. The project is presented by BAIK Art (Los Angeles, Seoul, Jakarta).
Museum of Sufi Art and Culture – Special Performance
MTO Zendeh Delan performance of Music and Samā with a live quartet of tar, daf, guitar, and harp, accompanied by a French vocalist. An experience which mixes traditional Sufi music with an exploration of Samā spiritual practices, offering an immersive voyage through rhythm, melody, and devotion.
CINEMA NOW
This year also the launch of Cinema NOW, a new screening program that brings film and moving image into dialogue with the fair. The program includes a selection of films by NOWNESS, a focus on Iran curated by researcher Zohreh Deldadeh; a selection by Shwetal Patel, founder of the Kochi Biennale, from the Jaipur Centre for Artists’ Cinema / Artist’s Cinema, and a curated program by Eunice Tsang, founder of Current Plans and associate curator at M+ museum.
Nowness
NOWNESS – presents three curated film programs inspired by this year’s theme, featuring short films and moving image works. The full program will also be available online at NOWNESS.com.
Shwetal Patel follows the Jaipur Centre
Dr Shwetal Alvin Patel will present the screening program at Asia NOW alongside Monica Narula from the Raqs Media Collective.
“This evening programme at Asia Now looks to nurture the poetic potential of cinema—envisioning film as a space of refuge and resistance in a time of acceleration, exploitation, and erasure,” says curator Dr. Shwetal Ashvin Patel.
Zohreh Deldadeh, “Mapping a shift, shifting a map”
The films in this program are deeply influenced by the individual and collective journeys of Iranian artists grappling with the concept and memory of home. These filmmakers, hailing from Iran and the broader diaspora across France, Germany, the Netherlands, England, and Spain, have all experienced some form of displacement. Their cinematic works bear the imprint of this experience, reshaping their understanding of home—be it a place of dwelling, an in-between space, an inner feeling of belonging, or a restless state of being.
For these artists, the traditional duality of “here or there” dissolves into a more complex question: “If not here, then where?” This perpetual query forges a definition of home that defies a single, static meaning. What, then, is home? Is it a place caught between the echoes of past memories and the pull of future aspirations? Is it an intangible sanctuary of the mind, a construct beyond words, or a tangible location with discernible coordinates and a name? The films in this program invite us to explore these profound questions alongside the artists, offering a multifaceted meditation on what it truly means to be at home.
Video program from Of Mountains and Seas curated by John
Tain The video program from Of Mountains and Seas, the 2024 edition of the Lahore Biennale, featuring a video commissioned by LBF from Bani Abidi, Stolon Press (Simryn Gill and Tom Melick), Niamat Nigar, Fazal Rizvi, and Zheng Bo, as well as works by Gidree Bawlee. The program, like the works on view throughout the Monnaie de Paris, offer a vision of ecological awareness from Asian perspectives.
Powered by the French Embassy to Pakistan.
CONTEMPORARY CRAFT
Since its inception, Asia NOW has championed craft as a vital thread between tradition and contemporary expression. This year spotlights three artists who have been finalists in different editions of the LOEWE Craft Prize.
Artists selected:
Sumakshi Singh (India) – Embroidered installations tracing memory and spiritual space.
Presented by 193 Gallery and TAK Contemporary.
Racso Jugarap (Philippines) – Textile works exploring mythology, diaspora, and queer identity.
Presented by Galerie Nathan Chiche
Wan Bing Huang (China) – Surreal landscapes across drawing, animation, and installation.
Presented by Looloolook Gallery
CONVERSATION PLATFORM
The K11 Salon, co-presented by K11 Art Foundation and Asia Art Now, offers an exploration of the dynamic intersection of society, technology, and culture. The program highlights how contemporary artists and curators navigate and redefine creativity in the digital era. The discussion will feature curator Alexis Loisel-Montambaux and artist Vivien Zhang, moderated by John Tain, Curator of the Lahore Biennale.
To mark the MATSUTANI PRIZE awarded by the SHŌEN Endowment Fund, Liyu Yeo will moderate a roundtable discussion with Tom Laurent, Nathanaëlle Herbelin, exploring the mission of the Japanese SHŌEN Foundation in supporting the Matsutani Prize.
Under the Craft strand, the MANUFACTURE DE SÈVRES presents a talk with Céline Paul on the deep historical links between the institution and Asia.
The MUSÉE CERNUSCHI proposes a dialogue with Pierre Gautier and Yoshimi Futamura on Japanese ceramics and contemporary forms of transmission.
TWO PRIZES TO SUPPORT ARTISTIC CREATION
RAK Art Fondation Prize (New)
Introducing the RAK ART FOUNDATION Prize Awarded to two artists participating in Asia NOW 2025, this prize offers a one-month residency at The Art Station in Bahrain awarded by the RAK Art Foundation of Bahrain.
Selected artists will collaborate with local artisans to develop new work aligned with the Foundation’s values of heritage, continuity, and craft. The residency includes travel, accommodation, and a production fee, with an exhibition at the Foundation to follow.
The 2025 jury includes patron Benedicta Badia (France); Emre Baykal, Director of Arter Foundation (Turkey); Sara Raza, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, Tashkent (Uzbekistan/USA); Salma Tuqan, Director of Nottingham Contemporary (UK/Palestine); and curator Anissa Touati (France/Morocco), affiliated with Brown and Harvard.
Residency: between December 2025 and December 2026
Jury deliberation & winner announcement: October 23–24, 2025
Award Ceremony: Friday, October 24
Matsutani Prize
The ceremony will take place during Asia NOW at the Monnaie de Paris for the second year in a row.
Awarded by the SHŌEN Fund, the Matsutani Prize grants €15,000 to an artist based in France, with 5 to 25 years of career, selected by a jury of artists, curators, and collectors.
For this 2025 edition, Liyu Yeo—curator and Asia NOW VIP Ambassador—will serve as guest rapporteur.
Jury 2025
Takesada Matsutani – artist
Kate Van Houten – artist
Nathanaëlle Herbelin – 2019 laureate
Jean-Philippe Bourgeno – collector, Publisher
Tom Laurent – Arc Critic
Finalists artists
Liang Fu (Nicodim gallery)
Daiga Grantina (Emalin gallery)
Séquoia Scavullo (sans titre gallery)
Natsuko Uchino (Galerie Allen, Sorry We’re Closed)
*Inspired by theorist Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “third space,” this section explores cultural hybridity
and transformation. It serves as a site where multiple cultures intersect, opening space for experimental
projects and collective thinking.
Press release from Asia NOW
Image: Monnaie de Paris © Lionel Belluteau
