Asia NOW wrapped up this week, marking a vibrant conclusion to its 11th edition in Paris. The curated art fair, dedicated to amplifying the artistic voices of Asia and its diaspora, continues to redefine the relationship between East and West. Under the theme Grow, the 2025 edition explored art as fertile ground for transformation and empathy. Drawing on Leela Gandhi’s notion of “affective communities,” this year’s fair invited audiences to consider how solidarity and shared sensibilities emerge across geographies, histories, and cultural divides.
This edition positioned West Asia at the heart of its programming, acknowledging that regions once seen as peripheral are now central to shaping contemporary discourse. The West Asia Public Program, titled My East is Your West, extended this vision by spotlighting artists and initiatives from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and the UAE, each offering distinct perspectives on identity, landscape, and memory.
The Saudi Visual Arts Commission presented Ghosts of Today and Tomorrow by Ahaad Alamoudi, a performative installation of sound and light that blurred the temporal boundaries between the ancestral and the contemporary. AFALULA showcased Under the Aegis of the Moon, a poetic project by Chinese artist Han Mengyun, curated by Arnaud Morand and inspired by her residency in AlUla’s desert landscape. Saudi artist Mohammed Alfaraj transformed La Monnaie de Paris’s columns with prints of native Al Hasa palm trees, symbolically grafting desert genealogies into urban architecture.
Lebanese artist, Pascal Hachem’s Threaded Whole, presented by Alserkal Advisory (UAE), unfolded as a performance on “growing memory,” examining rupture and continuity through everyday objects. Sarah Brahim’s I like never, I also like ever suspends video installations of two bodies in slow, repetitive motion, creating a meditative space where weightlessness and ritual emerge through cyclical movement.
Through these projects, Asia NOW 2025 redefined Asia as a mutable, relational paradigm. The fair emphasised patient cultivation of memory, affective bonds, and emergent practices demonstrating that growth is not only measured in scale, but in the ethical, aesthetic, and social networks that sustain creativity across the continent and beyond.