Asia Now 2025

Asia Now is Paris’s leading art fair dedicated to contemporary Asian voices and their diasporas. For over a decade, it has pushed beyond traditional East–West divides, spotlighting overlooked regions and emerging perspectives.

Titled “Grow”, this year’s edition articulates a vision of art as a fertile ground for transformation, dialogue, and collective flourishing. More than a theme, “Grow” becomes a framework through which we engage with the shifting landscapes of identity, culture, and belonging, urging us to move beyond the constraints of geographical, historical, and cultural binaries.

Asia NOW unfolds at La Monnaie de Paris with around 70 international galleries, from established names like Esther Schipper, carlier | gebauer, and Tang Contemporary Art to newcomers including Arario, Capsule Shanghai, and BAIK Art. The NOW ON section spotlights young galleries founded after 2015. The newly inaugurated Third Space section, inspired by Homi Bhabha’s theory of hybridity, foregrounds South Asia with projects such as We Were Always Neighbors curated by Sahil Arora, and installations featuring collaborations across Mumbai, Seoul, Paris, Los Angeles, and Jakarta.

Beyond the exhibitions, “Grow” is embodied in a multidisciplinary public programme of performances, screenings, and conversations. These include Reenactments of Lost Rhythms (Colomboscope, Sri Lanka) curated by Natasha Ginwala and Hajra Haider, Han Mengyun’s lunar-inspired performative installation Under the Aegis of the Moon for AFALULA (Saudi Arabia), Pascal Hachem’s The Cut Line, supported by ALSERKAL Advisory of Dubai and the launch of Cinema NOW, featuring film selections by NOWNESS, Shwetal Patel, and Zohreh Deldadeh exploring Iranian diaspora themes of displacement and home. The performance segment of GROW presents works by Mella Jaarsma’s costume-based exploration of cultural and racial diversity and the soulful music and Sufi ritual Samāʿ by MTO Zendeh Delan. Craft remains a vital thread with artists such as Sumakshi Singh and Racso Jugarap expanding the dialogue between the ancestral and the contemporary through textile and embroidery practices, reaffirming craft as an interface of living memory and innovation.

Focus on South Asia Public Programme

The Focus on South Asia Public Program brings together major voices and platforms shaping the region’s contemporary cultural landscape. The Lahore Biennale Foundation (Pakistan), under the curatorial direction of John Tain, convenes intergenerational perspectives from Pakistan. Colomboscope (Sri Lanka), the leading interdisciplinary arts festival in Colombo, presents a performance by Chathuri Nissansala and a conversation between curator Hajra Haider Kaddar and artist Basir Mahmood, alongside a screening of works by Nepalese artist Subas Tamang, whose practice examines caste, Indigenous identity, and memory. From India, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, represented by Shwetal Ashvin Patel, founding member of the Biennale, Anissa Touati, Researcher at Brown University, USA, Curator of the Biennale BCK in Greece and artist-curator Nikhil Chopra, reflects on the forthcoming edition For the Time Being, while also sharing a curated film from the Jaipur Centre for Art’s programme Artist’s Cinema, celebrating cinema as an artistic and collective form.

Focus on West Asia

As the art world’s compass continues to tilt, “Asia” is no longer a one-size-fits-all concept stretching neatly from Tokyo to Tehran. This year, the fair invites us to rethink our directional assumptions with the theme “My East is Your West” – a playful and poignant nod to the cultural relativity of geography. West Asia, more commonly referred to as the Middle East, has stepped into a new discursive and curatorial spotlight, with the region’s cultural ecosystems asserting engagement on their own terms.