Sacred images, data glitches, and new art ecosystems
Contemporary Art — Southeast Asia
Vernissage
THOMAS
Curator · Writer · Visual Artist
This week I kept thinking about how images survive us — on temple walls, in museums, in archives, and now inside URLs. From Nara’s Buddhist paintings returning home, to Ryoji Ikeda’s surgical noise, to Saudi Arabia building an ecosystem in real time: everything is about transmission. Not just what art is, but how it travels, gets documented, and stays alive. That question feels especially sharp from Southeast Asia, where preservation and disappearance often happen in the same breath.
01 — This Week
Buddhist Painting from Nara
I love when an exhibition isn’t just “beautiful objects,” but a whole circuit of time closing. These Nara Buddhist paintings feel like concentrated memory — mandalas as technology, pigment as devotion. The ‘homecoming’ aspect matters: works leaving Japan, living elsewhere, then returning with new scars and new readings. It’s also a reminder that Asia’s sacred art was never provincial — it was cosmopolitan, Silk Road-wired, and visually ambitious.
02 — This Week
Ryoji Ikeda Wins 2026 Nam June Paik Prize
Ikeda winning the Nam June Paik Prize makes perfect sense: Paik cracked open the screen; Ikeda dissects the signal itself. I’m drawn to how his work turns math, code, and “glitch” into something almost spiritual — like a contemporary sutra written in strobe and frequency. Seen from East Asia, this lineage matters: experimental media art here isn’t an import; it’s a tradition with teeth and risk.
03 — This Week
Roots and Reach: Dina Amin on Building Saudi Arabia’s Visual Arts Ecosystem
This interview is institutional strategy, yes — but it’s also a portrait of a country trying to build memory while accelerating into the future. I’m interested in the tension: archiving a lineage (Bedayat), exporting artists into exchange programs, and performing global visibility via Venice. From Asia-Pacific, I read it as a familiar question: who gets to narrate origins, who funds the archive, and how artists stay complex inside nation-scale storytelling.
From My Books
I can’t retrieve an extract from my books right now because the search tool is failing (network error). If you resend in a few minutes, I’ll pull a passage that fits this week’s theme—art as transmission: sacred images, archives, and the fragile ways memory survives.
— Fragments
Pick of the Week
film
Sans Soleil
— Chris Marker
Because this week is about images that travel and mutate: from Nara’s sacred painting circuits to Ikeda’s data-liturgy to Saudi Arabia constructing an archive in public. Marker’s film is the ultimate meditation on memory-as-montage—Japan, time, and the ethics of recording.
Quote of the Week
"The work of art is a scream of freedom."
— Christo
Vernissage · Thomas · 2026