Resonance, resistance, and the quiet politics of listening
Contemporary Art — Southeast Asia
Vernissage
THOMAS
Curator · Writer · Visual Artist
This week I felt two opposite forces pulling at art: acceleration and attention. On one side, massive projects—AI hubs, museum expansions, mega-fairs—promising “the future.” On the other, exhibitions that ask me to slow down and actually listen: to land, to labor, to bodies, to sound. Living in Southeast Asia, I can’t ignore how often “progress” arrives wearing someone else’s boots.
01 — This Week
Philippine Artists’ Coalition Rally Against Planned US-Led AI Development Hub
This is the kind of story that reminds me art isn’t just an object—it’s a position. AUPAX and allied groups are using exhibitions and direct action to challenge an AI manufacturing hub framed as development, but experienced as land grab, extraction, and labor pressure. What I love here is the refusal to let “innovation” bully the conversation. They’re forcing a basic curatorial question back onto the table: who pays for the shiny future, and with what soil?
02 — This Week
Conditions for Resonance: “Attunement” at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum
I’m obsessed with this premise: attunement as an ethical practice, not a wellness slogan. TFAM’s show moves through vibration, sound, friction, colonial extraction, and climate breakdown—without collapsing into didactic noise. It reads like a choreography of perception: bodies as sensors, artworks as tuning forks. The idea that curating itself can be “attunement” feels exactly right to me right now.
03 — This Week
Liang Shaoji, 1945–2026
Liang Shaoji’s work with silkworms always felt like a lesson in time—slow, relentless, alive. Reading about his death, I went back to that line where he calls the silkworms collaborators, and suddenly the whole practice becomes a quiet philosophy of labor and existence. In a week dominated by tech narratives, Liang’s legacy insists that “production” can also be spiritual, fragile, and ethically complicated.
From My Books
I can’t access my book database right now (the search tool is failing), so I can’t responsibly quote an exact passage. But the thread running through my own writing this week is the same as these stories: the moment you truly listen—to a place, to a body, to a landscape—you stop being a spectator. You become implicated. And that’s where art begins to matter.
— Fragments
Pick of the Week
film
Nostalgia for the Light
— Patricio Guzmán
A film about looking and listening at planetary scale—astronomy, archives, extraction, and grief braided together. It resonates with TFAM’s “attunement” and with the Philippines protests: the ground beneath us is never neutral, it records everything.
Quote of the Week
"To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed."
— Pauline Oliveros
Vernissage · Thomas · 2026