Sacred objects, living exchange, unstable venues
Contemporary Art — Southeast Asia
Vernissage
THOMAS
Curator · Writer · Visual Artist
This week I kept thinking about how objects travel—and what they carry with them besides beauty. A temple painting, a piece of cloth, a fair booth, a museum label: each one is a passport, a disguise, sometimes a wound. From Nara to Hong Kong to Seoul, the “sacred” is never static—it’s negotiated, relocated, repackaged. And in Southeast Asia, I feel that negotiation in my bones: devotion and spectacle often share the same room.
01 — This Week
Indonesian Textiles: Bali and Lombok
Cloth here isn’t decoration—it’s infrastructure for belief, ancestry, and social life. I love how this show treats textiles as an active technology: protection, ceremony, identity, and power, all woven into pattern. Also: the Bali–Lombok relationship is the real contemporary lesson—exchange without flattening difference. If you only ever look at “textiles” through Western craft categories, this will reset your eyes.
02 — This Week
The Forbidden City and The World
I’m obsessed with this framing: the Forbidden City not as sealed purity, but as a machine for global dialogue—objects as diplomats. The details are delicious: Southeast Asian sandalwood as court material, jewels and technologies reshaping taste, clocks as soft power. Hong Kong feels like the perfect lens for this story—where trade, aesthetics, and geopolitics constantly remix. It’s a reminder that “influence” is rarely one-way; it’s more like smuggling, seduction, and translation.
03 — This Week
Whispering Gallery: Relocations, Rents, and Renumeration
The theme for Kiaf + Frieze Seoul is “Coexistence,” and the universe immediately answers: construction dust. I love this piece because it’s honest about the real contemporary art medium nobody admits—real estate. Seoul’s art week has become a regional magnet, but the logistics will shape the discourse as much as any curatorial statement. In Asia-Pacific, the art scene is maturing fast—and the fight is increasingly about space, not just ideas.
From My Books
I decide to go to the contemporary art museum. I get a bit of cash changed just across from the restaurant, then call a Grab—the Asian equivalent of Uber. It arrives quickly. I bump my head climbing into the imposing right-hand-drive Toyota. The driver shoots off with that powerful automatic acceleration. The city passes by—organized chaos, but not without charm. The taxi drops me right at the entrance, where a guy opens the door and greets me ten times, as if I were expected. All that’s missing are the paparazzi. The museum is decent. Lots of religious art: huge frescoes, spectacular stagings of heroes from the Bhagavad Gita, endless Buddha images—very colorful, a bit kitsch. Not really my style. I’m tired from the trip, a little disconnected from my emotions—not the ideal state for admiring works. I wander without much attention until a floor where the rooms change atmosphere. There, the art becomes more contemporary in style, more Western without necessarily being of another era. Suddenly a piece grabs me, catches my attention despite the fatigue: a triptych by a Thai artist, Kiettisak Channonart, titled Birth – Ageing – Sickness – Death. Three canvases, three instants of a human life, represented in a closed, claustrophobic geometry.
— Fragments
Pick of the Week
film
In the Mood for Love
— Wong Kar-wai
Because this week is about what can’t be said directly: belief coded into cloth, diplomacy embedded in objects, power disguised as logistics. Wong’s film is exactly that—ritual, restraint, and atmosphere doing the talking. Like sacred art, it’s a slow transmission.
Quote of the Week
"A work of art is a meditation object: it gathers time and returns it to you changed."
— Agnes Martin
Vernissage · Thomas · 2026