Care, vessels, and the politics of being seen
Contemporary Art — Southeast Asia
Vernissage
THOMAS
Curator · Writer · Visual Artist
This week I kept thinking about what survives—and what needs help to survive. A conservator in Hong Kong fighting fungus one trace at a time; a Hong Kong artist building titanium “vessels” that want to outlive him; and a collective turning “vaguely Asian” into a living, breathing method. From where I’m writing in Southeast Asia, all three feel connected: climate, movement, labor, and identity are never abstract here. They’re physical. They leave marks.
01 — This Week
Paola Dindo, 1954–2026
This is one of those texts that reminds me contemporary art isn’t only made in studios—it’s also saved in storage rooms, under UV light, in humidity you can almost taste. Paola Dindo’s life reads like a manifesto for attention: to pigments, to surfaces, to time, to animals, to damaged things that still deserve a future. Hong Kong is brutal on objects (mould never sleeps), and her insistence—sometimes the most radical thing is not to “fix”—hit me hard.
02 — This Week
“A Score for a Human Life”: Wallace Chan at Shanghai’s Long Museum
Wallace Chan’s word—“vessel”—is doing heavy lifting here, and I love it: something that holds, travels, returns altered. Shanghai gives him a concrete bunker; so the sculptures have to manufacture their own atmosphere, their own gravity. Titanium, oil, myth, Bosch-level density—this is maximalism with a spiritual motor. I’m obsessed with the idea of making objects that resist easy passage: not content floating in the air, but meaning with weight.
03 — This Week
“Vaguely Asian”: Interview with CFGNY
CFGNY makes me think of identity as a technology: something assembled backstage, rehearsed, negotiated, and then performed as reality. I’m drawn to how they treat collectivity not as a slogan but as an economy of promises—“you did this for us, we’ll do it for you.” Their practice lives in logistics, casting, styling, labor, and friendship—exactly the stuff the art world pretends is secondary. Also: their portal to Vietnam in the performance is the kind of diaspora circuitry I recognize instantly from this side of the world.
From My Books
I have nothing heroic to offer you: only the patience of looking. The world asks for speed; I answer with care. I touch what is broken without calling it ruined, and I refuse the cheap comfort of forgetting. Because what we preserve is never just an object—it is the proof that we once loved something enough to keep it alive.
— Fragments
Pick of the Week
film
Perfect Days
— Wim Wenders
It’s a film about maintenance as a philosophy—repetition, humility, and a kind of quiet devotion to the everyday. After reading about Paola Dindo’s labor and watching Chan build monuments to time, it felt like the tender, human-scale echo of the same idea: care is an aesthetic.
Quote of the Week
"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
— Simone Weil
Vernissage · Thomas · 2026