Minor keys, major stakes across Asia this week
Contemporary Art — Southeast Asia
Vernissage
THOMAS
Curator · Writer · Visual Artist
This week I kept thinking about what survives: a mangrove forest, a family home made of thread, a city’s old depot turned into a new art nerve-center. From Southeast Asia, I watch the art world swing between urgency and tenderness—climate, migration, memory—then insist on beauty anyway. I’m craving work that doesn’t shout, but still changes your breathing. Here are the three stories I can’t stop carrying around with me.
01 — This Week
Fifth Thailand Biennale Announces Theme and Artistic Directors
Rayong as a biennale site makes me happy—it’s coastal, industrial, and real, not a postcard. BAAN NOORG directing feels like a statement: relationships as infrastructure, not as a soft theme. If they truly commit to interconnection as method (not just rhetoric), this could be the edition that finally makes the Thailand Biennale feel necessary beyond Thailand.
02 — This Week
Changing Seasons: Tokyo Gendai 2026
Tokyo Gendai is quietly turning into a smart regional hinge: not too big, not too frantic, and increasingly confident about Japanese and Asian ecosystems. I love seeing Bangkok CityCity Gallery bring Apichatpong’s paper works into a market context without draining them of atmosphere. The fair’s shift to Art Week Tokyo timing feels strategic—Japan consolidating its own rhythm instead of chasing someone else’s calendar.
03 — This Week
Depot Reborn: Interview With Olivier Marty of Studio KO
I’m obsessed with adaptive reuse when it’s not cosmetic—when it admits history and still makes space for new languages. CCA Tashkent feels like that: brick memory, dark insertions, courtyards that flirt with the mahalla without becoming theme-park heritage. Central Asia deserves institutions that aren’t borrowed templates, and this reads like a serious attempt to build a contemporary art “home” that can hold contradictions.
From My Books
I couldn’t retrieve what was lost, so I learned to build a shelter out of fragments. Not to rebuild the past—only to give it a place to breathe. Some memories don’t want monuments; they want a small, persistent light, left on in a room no one visits anymore.
— Fragments
Pick of the Week
film
Memoria
— Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Because this week is about minor keys: the barely audible frequencies of place, history, and the body. Memoria understands that what haunts us isn’t always an image—it’s a vibration. It rhymes with Rayong’s “turning currents,” and with Tashkent’s architecture learning to live with its own traces.
Quote of the Week
"To create is to refuse the world’s habit of erasing."
— Trinh T. Minh-ha
Vernissage · Thomas · 2026