Contemporary Art — Southeast Asia

Vernissage

THOMAS

Curator · Writer · Visual Artist

This week I’ve been thinking about what survives—and what gets deliberately erased. Across Asia-Pacific, the art world is obsessing over archives, names, and the politics of visibility. From Seoul’s institutional stewardship to Chinese conceptualists who destroyed their own work, it’s all the same question: who controls the record? And what happens when the record fights back?

01 — This Week

China Withdraws from Gwangju Biennale over Taiwan Designation

Gwangju reminds us that a “pavilion title” is never just typography—it’s a battlefield. I’m struck by how quickly cultural diplomacy turns into cultural veto, and how artists get squeezed between state positions and institutional survival. If you work in Asia, you already know: naming is power, and power hates ambiguity. The Biennale’s apology reads like damage control, but the real artwork here is the conflict itself.

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02 — This Week

Memory and Stewardship: Notes from South Korea

I loved this because it’s not “Korea as aesthetic”—it’s Korea as infrastructure: museums, archives, repeated public engagement. The Saudi participants articulate something vital: preservation isn’t only objects, it’s atmosphere, process, emotional history. From Southeast Asia, where institutions often run on fragility and speed, this kind of long-term care feels almost radical. It’s a reminder that the future of art isn’t just talent—it’s systems that don’t abandon artists after the opening night.

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03 — This Week

“Poetry goes no further than language” at Buxton Contemporary

A show that resurrects what was almost designed to vanish: China’s New Measurement Group and Qian Weikang, conceptualists who practiced self-erasure. I’m obsessed with the tension here—rule-based dryness, pseudoscience, and then this sudden crack where chance becomes poetry. The fact that key works had to be recreated (with permission) raises a deliciously uncomfortable question: what is the “original” when history has been deleted? From Beijing to Melbourne, this is about who writes the canon—and who gets written back in.

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From My Books

I couldn’t retrieve an extract from my books this week—the archive search tool failed on my side. If you want, I’ll rerun it and send a proper excerpt translated into English as soon as the connection is back.

— Fragments

Pick of the Week

film

Rashomon

— Akira Kurosawa

Because this week is about competing narratives: who gets to name, who gets to archive, who gets to be believed. Kurosawa’s film is the purest lesson in how “truth” becomes a construction—and how power lives inside the telling.

Quote of the Week

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

— George Orwell

Vernissage · Thomas · 2026