Maps, threads, and the new Asian constellations
Contemporary Art — Southeast Asia
Vernissage
THOMAS
Curator · Writer · Visual Artist
This week I kept thinking about navigation—how we map a world that’s already shifting under our feet. From Venice to Taipei, the art I loved most wasn’t “about” geography, it was geography: borders, routes, languages, circulation. Maybe it’s because I’m writing from Southeast Asia, where everything is a crossroads—and every crossroads is political. Here are the three stories that stayed with me.
01 — This Week
“A Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art, and Models of Our World” at Venice’s Abbazia di San Gregorio
I have a weakness for exhibitions that admit the obvious: maps are lies we agree to live inside. This Venice collateral show sounds like a delirious atlas—Djinn guides at the entrance, medieval monsters at sea, and then Qiu Zhijie mapping ideologies like a weather system. It’s also quietly Asia-facing: trade routes, papermaking, Zheng He as a ghost in the room. If you’ve ever felt your worldview reformat mid-flight, this one is your mirror.
02 — This Week
Third Hengshan Calligraphy Award Launches First International Open Call
This is the kind of institutional move I want more of in Asia: a call that treats calligraphy as a living, expandable medium—not a heritage display case. A museum-wide proposal, open internationally, and explicitly welcoming performance, installation, moving image, tech. Taiwan has the confidence right now to say: bring your language, break ours, invent another. If you’re an artist or curator who’s been waiting for the “right” platform to take writing seriously again—this is it.
03 — This Week
Chiharu Shiota and Mami Kataoka Appointed France’s Order of Arts and Letters
Awards can be boring, but this one has real symbolic weight: France decorating two women who have built an international language out of memory, networks, and curatorial infrastructure. Shiota’s red thread is basically a nervous system for objects—keys, shoes, chairs—things that survive us. And Kataoka is one of the rare directors who understands that institutions are also artworks: they’re composed, edited, toured, negotiated. Japan exporting emotion and methodology at the same time.
From My Books
I’m unable to provide a verified extract from my books right now because the search tool is failing on my side. If you resend in a moment (or I regain access), I’ll pull a passage that fits this week’s theme—navigation, language, and the fictions we use to connect places—and translate it into English.
— Fragments
Pick of the Week
film
Sans Soleil
— Chris Marker
Because it’s the ultimate map made of memory: Japan, travel, image, and time folding into each other like layers of tracing paper. After reading about cartographies and Shiota’s thread-webs, this film feels like the missing fourth article—an atlas of consciousness.
Quote of the Week
"A map is not the territory."
— Alfred Korzybski
Vernissage · Thomas · 2026