Sacred images, self-obliteration, and what survives
Contemporary Art — Southeast Asia
Vernissage
THOMAS
Curator · Writer · Visual Artist
This week I felt surrounded by images that refuse to stay “just images.” Buddhist painting, pilgrimage sites, and Kusama’s infinity all point to the same pressure point: what survives us. Living in Southeast Asia, I’m constantly reminded that spirituality isn’t a theme here—it’s an infrastructure. And contemporary art, at its best, doesn’t decorate that reality. It cuts into it.
01 — This Week
150 Previews
This is the kind of issue-preview that works like a compass. I’m especially locked in on Bangkok Art Biennale 2026: “Angels and Mara” feels like a perfect, uneasy frame for the moment—desire vs. fear, purity vs. corruption, temples vs. public space. Also: Som Supaparinya and Amar Kanwar—artists who understand that history isn’t behind us; it’s inside the landscape.
02 — This Week
Yayoi Kusama, 1929–2026
Kusama’s death hits like the end of a weather system: you realize how much light came from it, and how much shadow too. I’ve always loved the violence inside the seduction—those dots as both euphoria and erasure, a public invitation and a private symptom. This piece insists on the severity of her project: repetition as survival, infinity as a wager against disappearance.
03 — This Week
New Currents: Lesley-Anne Cao
This is contemporary art speaking softly while doing something brutal. Fabric books submerged, pages turned by waves—memory literally operated by water. As someone who lives in a region where typhoons are not metaphors, I find this work piercing: names of retired storms embroidered so they can’t be erased, returning through the same element that once carried the devastation.
From My Books
My heart rate changed; calmer now, my heartbeat grows lighter. The painting awakens lost sensations in me, buried deep inside—sensations bleached by time and stained by life. The chain of transmission is broken; that world no longer exists. In the world I’m experiencing, time and distance blur, becoming almost incoherent, stripped of meaning. I’m not really where I am, and even less at the moment I’m supposed to be. Paradoxically, I feel I could step into that scene, as if my place were with them—and not in this universe where I never find my place. I move constantly through space, but the real problem is time. I refuse to accept the limits my body imposes. I seek the infinite by defying matter. With a deep sadness and a certain anxiety, I watch these beings frozen for eternity, because they confront me with the fleeting nature of my own incarnation. I don’t feel more real than they do. They look at each other, I look at them—yet who is looking at me?
— Oneiric Experience
Pick of the Week
film
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
— Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Because this week is about what returns: storms, histories, and selves. Apichatpong treats memory as a spiritual ecology—soft, haunted, porous—where the dead don’t vanish, they coexist. It’s the gentlest possible bridge between Buddhism’s images and Kusama’s infinity.
Quote of the Week
"We must become so absorbed in contemplation that we forget our own existence."
— Katsushika Hokusai
Vernissage · Thomas · 2026