GROUP EXHIBITION

For many artists, 25 marks the beginning of their careers. Artists’ early works often reveal core artistic concepts before practices, concerns, and vocabularies had time to mature and gather complexity. We asked each artist: Where did they live and work at 25? What were they reading and listening to? What influenced them? What were their daily lives like? What were their loves and frustrations?

At 25, Part I centres on some of Asia’s most prominent contemporary artists: Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976, Singapore; based in Singapore), Tehching Hsieh (b. 1950, Pingtung; based in New York), Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b. 1957, Trat; based in Chiang Mai), and Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958, Kunming; based in Beijing and Chengdu). The exhibition presents artwork alongside rare archival materials to portray the worlds that shaped each artist at 25. This allows a rare glimpse into the relationships between cultural environments in various historical periods and contemporary art across Asia. A close reading of personal histories and archives highlights each artists’ particularities, and offers a look behind recognition and career achievements to reveal their 25-year-old selves responding to the urgencies and uncertainties of their time.

This approach allows for micro and macro perspectives of the past, prompting a research approach that extends beyond art historians’ usual archival resources. Besides artist and art institutional records, research also encompasses documentary photography and film, TV, radio, and other mass media, as well as government, academic, and personal collections. At 25 further extends the invitation to visitors to reflect on or imagine their own 25th year, allowing them to weave their personal timelines into a much larger cultural and historical continuum.

All artists included in At 25 have been inspirational collaborators of AAA, and reflect the unique network that AAA has cultivated across Asia since its founding. Each artist’s early world is a fragment of a larger mosaic—demonstrating what it meant to be young, ambitious, and uncertain in a rapidly changing Asia. Through vastly different historical and cultural contexts, this presentation also reflects generational shifts: how environments of learning, political order, and access to information have evolved, and how “beginnings” themselves have changed across decades. As such, the exhibition helps uncover common threads and resonant echoes among these otherwise rarely connected artists.

AAA’s 25th anniversary is an opportunity to look back at the first quarter of this century and at the artists, curators, and researchers who have grown alongside AAA as witnesses to this journey. Their memories and questions have shaped AAA’s direction, emphasising the collective significance of archiving, inseparable from the societies and relationships that sustain it. With the future of art history and archiving in mind, this compelling moment not only invites us to look back, but also inspires us to imagine and to take action in shaping the three quarters of the century that lie ahead. Archives help us understand origins, and, as such, reveal possible futures.