ASIA NOW 2025

For Anum (b.1964, Kelantan, Malaysia), this return to Europe marks a poignant milestone—forty years since her first solo in Florence, Italy. Trained in architecture in the United States before pursuing an arts major Braunschweig, Germany, Anum’s practice is shaped by rigorous technique learnt and honed across continents before her return to Malaysia. Her figurative paintings interlace references from everyday life, popular culture and literature. New works that will be presented at the fair take inspiration from myriad forms of entertainment in music and dance, from the Bollywood movie An Evening in Paris (1967) to Salome’s dance of the seven veils. She also references Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds, to reflect on the notion of utopia and fantasy. Beneath their guise of naivety and delicacy, her works weave subtle psychological narratives with a droll attitude towards the unusual, even if banal. A signature motif in her paintings is repeating patterned tiles in varying shades of cool and warm colours, as intricate tiles in the foreground of Disc or paired ingeniously with a still life as a diptych such as in Slipper O / Solo and Duo. With her calculated choice of colours and clever calibration of proportionality, a curious harmony exudes from these compositions.

For Sciascia (b.1972, Sicily, Italy; lives and works in Bali, Indonesia), the story is one of embeddedness and immersion in Bali, Indonesia. A Sicilian artist who has lived in Bali for twenty-six years since 1998, he takes Light, humanity’s fundamental force of evolution, as both medium and metaphor for his compositions. His practice is one of temporal layering, drawing on organic materials found in the tropics such as volcanic ash and fossilised amber, to meditate on time, knowledge, and the intersections between anthropology, ritual, and technological evolution. Like Anum, he subtly incorporates classical painting motifs and techniques to his sculptural objects, such as the eyes of Saint Lucy from Italian renaissance painting_._ Or Primitive Mornings, a fragment of a Greco-Roman mask, which recalls the ancient epoch of both Man and Earth, while simultaneously gesturing at Balinese rituals and the Hellenistic world. The sculptures are paintings on found materials, evoking his childhood in Sicily among ancient ruins, and reflecting on the shared paleolithic beginnings of humanity.

Together, Anum and Sciascia represent the crossings that Asia NOW has championed for more than a decade: between East and West, past and present, art history and lived experience. There is a transnational dialogue of methodologies and techniques amongst the two. They remind us that art is not simply a reflection of place, but a way of reimagining it.