Asia NOW 2025 Challenges Notions of Asia as a Fixed Geography
The edition frames ‘Asia’ as a living field, with a particular emphasis on West and South Asia and other often overlooked regions. Save to My Ocula
Asia NOW returns to the Monnaie de Paris from 22 to 26 October with a VIP preview on Tuesday 21 October. For its eleventh edition, the fair brings together around 70 galleries presenting solo or duo exhibitions by artists from 28 territories across Asia.
Returning galleries include carlier | gebauer (Madrid, Berlin), Esther Schipper (Berlin, Seoul, Paris), Gallery SIDE 2 (Tokyo), NIKA Project Space (Dubai, Paris), Kaikai Kiki (Tokyo), O Art Space (Lahore), Sabrina Amrani (Madrid), Tang Contemporary Art (Hong Kong, Bangkok, Beijing, Seoul, Singapore), and Yeo Workshop (Singapore), with first-time participants including ARARIO Gallery (Seoul, Cheonan, Shanghai), Baik Art (Lost Angeles, Seoul, Jakarta), Capsule (Shanghai), GALLERY2 (Seoul) and KLEMM’S (Berlin).
The Asia NOW curatorial platform, supported by Sisley, describes this year’s theme ‘Grow’ as a way to rethink cultural geographies and an invitation to ‘witness how perceptions take root and transform our understanding of the world’.
‘Growth here is rhizomatic—less a straight line than a weave of solidarities, temporalities, and shared practices,’ says Arnaud Morand, independent curator and Head of Arts at AFALULA.
Since its founding in 2015 with just 18 galleries, Asia NOW has expanded over the past decade to include more than two dozen territories across East, South, Southeast, Central, and West Asia, along with the diaspora. Since moving to the Monnaie de Paris in 2022, the fair has expanded its public programme of installations, performances, and talks, while its ‘Now On’ section has given visibility to young galleries founded after 2015.
Building on this expansion, Asia NOW 2025 frames Asia not merely as a fixed geography but as ‘a methodology’, probing the blind spots of conventional fairs and foregrounding plural and global ‘Asias’. In practice, this approach highlights artistic communities from Lahore, Colombo, AlUla, and Sharjah, showcasing their growing influence in reshaping regional and global networks.
The 2025 edition introduces ‘The Third Space’, a section for experimental, cross-regional projects taking its cue from theorist Homi Bhabha’s concept of a ‘third space’, where cultural perspectives intersect. Curated presentations include Iranian artist Laila Tara H, presented by HATCH, showing textile works that double as sound pieces, and a project curated by Sahil Arora and presented by Method exploring neighbourhood and border politics.
South Asia is present through institutional collaborations. The Lahore Biennale Foundation presents works from its third edition, Of Mountains and Seas (2024) curated by John Tain, with artists addressing ecological awareness and the climate crisis. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale contributes a discussion on temporality and place alongside a curated video programme, while Sri Lanka-based contemporary arts festival Colomboscope, founded by Natasha Ginwala and curated by Hajra Haider Karrar, brings performances and screenings around embodied knowledge and resistance.
‘Far more than a static exhibition, since experiencing rhythm-making is also an invitation for time travel, the acts in this edition assemble a communal score of creation, resistance and alliance-building,’ said Haider Karrar in a statement.
Asia NOW 2025 also positions West Asia prominently through a curated programme of installations, performances, screenings, and conversations. Saudi artist Ahaad Alamoudi, presented by the Saudi Visual Arts Commission, will stage recurring sound-and-light interventions; Sarah Brahim shows her video diptych I like never, I also like ever (2023); Chinese artist Han Mengyun unveils a lunar installation structured around poems unfolding with the lunar rise, foregrounding poetic expression as a mode that demands presence, vulnerability, and aliveness, developed during her residency in AlUla; and Lebanese artist Pascal Hachem presents a performance centred on rupture and memory.
‘It is not about reorientation, but about understanding that notions of East and West are fluid and inherently relative,’ says Anissa Touati, transnational independent curator working between the West and the global South, and the curator of the Biennale BCK in Greece.
Asia NOW continues to challenge traditional art-fair rules by combining sales booths with performances, institutional collaborations, and cross-regional curating. Described by X Zhu-Nowell, director of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, as ‘a fair that feels like a festival—what art should be’, it presents itself as a vibrant, celebratory platform.
Unfolding in a challenging time for the arts and its market, Asia NOW seeks to redirect attention towards collective growth and solidarity. More than a marketplace, the fair positions itself as a living ecology: cultivating encounters, alliances, and new affective communities across shifting geographies. —[O]
Main image: Ahaad Alamoudi, Ghost of Today and Tomorrow (2022). Courtesy the artist and Saudi Arabia's Visual Arts Commission.
A respected voice in contemporary art discourse.
Focusing on ambitious storytelling and insightful art-world commentary. Ocula Magazine publishes in-depth interviews, critical essays and timely analysis on the artists, exhibitions and ideas driving the global art world.
Learn more about Ocula Magazine
Showcasing the best of the art world.
Ocula partners with galleries from around the world to highlight their artists, artworks and exhibitions. Gallery membership is by application and invitation, with each member vetted by an independent panel.
Learn more about Ocula Membership
Specialises in the sale of major artworks.
Led by a team with deep ties to the world’s leading auction houses, galleries and collectors. Ocula’s advisory team offers bespoke services to high-net-worth clients from around the world who are looking to acquire the best of contemporary and modern art.
Learn more about our team and services