- writing
This section serves as an archive for my reviews of exhibitions, art fairs, biennales, and community-organized art events in different enclaves of Southeast Asia. Here, you will find both writings that have been published with a variety of platforms and personal notes that I jotted down during my travel.
Manila: Mark Salvatus
Mark Salvatus, ‘Sa kabila ng tabing lamang sa panahong ito’ (Waiting just behind the curtain of this age), 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Wika Nadera “Walking through Salvatus’s display is akin to lingering on a quiet note long after its initial resonance has dissipated. Here, visitors take a sonically cued meander through
Mekong Review: The curious case of the Cold War
“Is the Cold War truly over if its remnants are still hotly felt? Amid recent attempts to reassess this tumultuous period, three Bangkokian institutions staged two group shows highlighting the Cold War’s complex legacy in Thailand and its Southeast Asian neighbours. While The Shattered Worlds: Micro Narratives from the Ho
Shanghai: Wawi Navarroza
Installation view of ‘Wild at Heart’ at Fotografiska Shanghai. Image courtesy of Fotografiska Shanghai. “Teeming with vivacious colors and exuberant paraphernalia, Wawi Navarroza’s midcareer survey “Wild at Heart” at Fotografiska Shanghai appeared entrenched in a tropical daydream. Utilizing her body as an inquisitive and regenerative medium, Navarraza creates self-portraits that
Bangkok: Chulayarnnon Siriphol
View of “Chulayarnnon Siriphol: I a Pixel, We the People,” 2025. Photo: Bangkok CityCity Gallery. “Artist Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s semi-retrospective show “I a Pixel, We the People” renders his moving-image practice of nearly two decades into a meta-film, splicing his videos with a mélange of quotidian media. Embodying the artist’s time-honored
Phnom Penh: Vandy Rattana
View of “Vandy Rattana: Postcards from Home,” 2025. “On the walls of the exhibition’s front room, Rattana collaged variously sized images capturing a wide span of sites and periods and depicting subjects ranging from tourists swarming in front of the temples at Angkor Wat to tense-faced Khmer Rouge leaders on
Saigon: Tuan Andrew Nguyen
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Frontier, 2024, bamboo, enamel paint, metal wire, steel, wood, 79 7⁄8 × 60 1⁄4 × 8 1⁄2″. “The bamboo curtain is a common household item in Vietnam and coincidentally a Cold War metaphor for the ideological demarcation between capitalist and Communist states in Asia. Nguyen transformed the
Hanoi: Ngoc Nau
Screencap from Virtual Reverie: Echoes of A Forgotten Utopia, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Artforum. “Can a monument make a myth of a man? During her 2023 residency at Rupert in Vilnius, multimedia artist Ngoc Nau became intrigued by the Lithuanian capital’s Soviet-era public architecture and oral histories
Manila: Maria Taniguchi
View of “Maria Taniguchi: body of work,” 2024–25. “Maria Taniguchi’s solo exhibition “body of work” traces her fascination with the ways that time and space can be structurally composed and emotively perceived through a weightless insinuation of materiality. The artist presents her hallmark paintings—depicting tightly stacked blocks—in dialogue with new
Bangkok: Viriya Chotpanyavisut
Viriya Chotpanyavisut, Flower on the road, 2023, C-print with adhesive backing, 54 × 80 1⁄4″. “The images in Viriya Chotpanyavisut’s exhibition “The Beginning of Something Else” were saturated with a range of emotions but always evoked nature’s silent scream. Subdued in tone, Chotpanyavisut’s black-and-white and color photographs feature natural elements
Jakarta: Natasha Tontey
View of “Natasha Tontey: Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre,” 2024-25, Museum MACAN, Jakarta. All photos: Natasha Tontey/Audemars Piguet. “POSITIONED AS AN IMMERSIVE and filmic installation, Natasha Tontey’s first institutional show presents a challenging conundrum that intertwines existentialism with primatology, asking how we can unpack the coexistence of humans and primates without
Saigon: Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần
View of “Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần: iii.x_Unrealized Utopia,” 2024. Steel form: Analysis of an Image, 2024. Hanging: TUU–Das Kino, 2023. Utopia, as concrete as it is elusive, is the spectral pillar upholding so many Western schools of thought, from Christian belief in a messianic deliverance to the Marxist ideal of a
Yogyakarta: Timoteus Anggawan Kusno
Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, Asset Object Related to “After Colossus,” 2024, machine-learning-trained generated images and archival images on 35-mm film, acrylic, each 1 7⁄8 × 1 7⁄8″. In Timoteus’s recent exhibition “Fever Dream” at Kohesi Initiatives, Jogja, viewers encountered a cornucopia of objects, from ominous, blurry charcoal drawings of dictators and
Jakarta & Yogyakarta: Ade Darmawan
View of “Ade Darmawan: Water Resistance,” 2024, Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Photo: Kurniawan Widodo. Tuban (2019–), in the first room, was a mélange of furniture, found paraphernalia, and a distillation apparatus. Electric stoves were placed on wooden dining tables, reclining chairs, and wardrobes, transmitting heat into
Bangkok: Wantanee Siripattananuntakul
Screencap from Everyone is… Image courtesy of the artist and Artforum. “In a time when hypernyms such as “Anthropocene” and “nonhuman” are becoming desensitized in contemporary art, is it still worthwhile for artists to question our seemingly unsalvageable relationships with other species and explore potential modes of alternative communication with
Bangkok: Taiki Sakpisit
Taiki Sakpisit, Dark Was the Night, 2024, two-channel 4K video projection, color and black-and-white, sound, 15 minutes 30 seconds. “In this exhibition, sound functioned as an invisible compass, guiding Sakpisit’s video editing and eliciting moments of suspension and anticipation that further submerged viewers into his video pieces. Alternating between found
Saigon: Hoàng Dương Cầm
Hoàng Dương Cam, ‘Pre-helicopter Era, Michael Rabin in the middle of Dong Thap Muoi or Bach Violin Sonata 1005 Adagio’, 2021, oil on canvas, 195 x 260cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Quynh. The title ‘Pre-helicopter Era, Michael Rabin in the middle of Dong Thap Muoi or Bach
Chiang Mai: Nipan Oranniwesna
Nipan Oranniwesna, Then, one morning, they were found dead and hanged, 2020, ink-jet print on floor, wooden text. Installation view. Photo: Surachet Wonghun. “On the far side of the room, opposite the teak boxes, he’d sprinkled azure pigment onto the floor in abstract forms and commingled them with two sentences
Saigon: Vy Trịnh
Vy Trịnh, VISION, 2024, Honda Vision moped chassis, flat steel bar, steel rod, organza ribbon, satin ribbon, plastic beads, nickel-plated steel ball chain, rhinestone chain, wheel, rebar, stators, copper wire, brass, flux and rhinestone mesh. Photo: Galerie Quynh. “Positioning this vehicle not only as a quotidian household item but also
Bangkok: Korakrit Arunanondchai
View of “Korakrit Arunanondchai: nostalgia for unity,” 2024, Bangkok Kunsthalle, Bangkok. Photo: Bangkok Kunsthalle. “… The space’s ground is covered in a tar-like mixture of soil and ash, crushed from the building’s burnt pieces, rendering it a cold and fissured desert—a sensation heightened by the old gray concrete walls. A
Khon Kaen: Wilawan Wiangthong
Wilawan Wiangthong’s first solo exhibition in Thailand, “Mom of Alterity” at MAIELIE, brings together a complex orchestration of seven chaptered live performances accompanied by surreal moving images, sculptures, and photography. Within this psychosomatic domain, subversive forms of bodily expression manifested, alternative connections between species flourished, and the interstices between humanity’s
Phnom Penh: Trương Công Tùng
“In this ongoing work begun in 2023, Trương interlaced footage shot in his hometown in Vietnam’s Central Highlands to create a mix of oneiric bodies. An elephant’s somber eye, a teardrop trickling down rugose bronze-colored skin, a disheveled figure wandering across scorched red hills, a duo of spectral orbs in
Chiang Mai: Tada Hengsapkul
As viewers zoomed in, they discovered that these images were not in fact photographic prints, but were formed by hundreds of pixel-like paper disks lightly affixed to the heads of nails emerging from wood panels. The moment these works were hit by the slightest gust of air, the disks would
Bangkok: Orawan Arunrak
An artist flaneuse who positions herself at the conceptual intersection of personal attunement and collective experience, Orawan Arunrak has become a keen observer of subtle shifts in energy, distilling quotidian moments into innocent yet transcendent objects and installations. Her latest solo show, “The 4 Foundations,” employed a mélange of visual
Bangkok: Kornkrit Jianpinidnan
With a practice that spans experimental and commercial photography, Jianpinidnan is known for his lens-based method of capturing unsettling elements that imbue the photograph with mythmaking potential.
Kuala Lumpur: Nirmala Dutt
Her painting series “Great Leap Forward,” 1998–99, bore testament to the vanity of modernization by constructing a domain from which loomed the gunungan—a distinguished triangle symbolizing the universe in traditional Indonesian wayang kulit performances. Nonetheless, Dutt suggests that the sanctity of this cosmic realm has been tainted by the infringing consequences of unchecked developmentalism.
Kuala Lumpur: Yee I-Lann
Upon closer inspection, this script shape-shifts into a pair of arms that hug, wrestle, and squeeze. These limbs bear no identifying markers, simply serving as an undiluted symbol of both love and conflict.
Manila: Nice Buenaventura
In Gaian Assembly XVI, the dark-navy atolls and white volcanic islands on beige canvas conjurevisions of inkblots or torn photocopies.
Manila: Fyerool Darma
For Screenshot 11-03-2023 at 03:03 PM (philhuat 2GO) (all works cited, 2023), Darma collected vinyl strips bearing wall texts from previous exhibitions and wove these information-packed strands into striated collages that suggest sinuous oceanscapes.
Bangkok: Rushdi Anwar
In the smaller of the two galleries, Anwar installed When you pray for black gold, you must deal with the burning smoke too (all works cited, 2023), a cream-colored prayer rug embroidered with black Kurdish traditional patterns, spread out on a low pedestal and aligned toward Mecca. Over its coarse
Singapore: Nguyễn Trinh Thi
As viewers recline on beanbags placed strategically on the floor between the two screens, our split peripheral vision becomes enticed by a chimerical montage of found footage—Nguyễn’s previous moving images depicting Jrai people’s sound-centered cosmologies are interspersed with slices of natural landscapes and arpeggiated noises extracted from Vietnamese wartime films
Yogyakarta: Nadiah Bamadhaj
In Lanang Pijar, 2023, a featureless, horned face made of patinated cast brass in a robin’s-egg blue tone looms high above eye level. Suspended beneath it is a droplet-shaped resin womb covered unevenly in goat hide and internally lit. For The Harvest, 2023, a metal hook attached to a buffalo-hide
Manila: Buen Calubayan
As we viewed the trees surrounding Vargas through these magnified blueprints, our eyes aligned and deconstructed the terrain against the diagrams’ perpendicular angles, vanishing point, and grid tracks, alluding to how we have been educated—according to Western art’s pillars—to view natural landscapes in a detached and scientific manner, while forfeiting
Hanoi: Nguyễn Duy Mạnh
The centerpiece of this phantasmagorical feast is the severed head of a qilin—the guardian beast for prosperity in East Asian mythologies—now served half-flayed and white-eyed with disbelief. These ceramic cadavers thus transform into metaphors for his anguish at the commodification and consumption of forlorn craftsmanship and artistic creativity by neoliberal
Yogyakarta: Albert Yonathan Setyawan
For his solo exhibition “Capturing Silence,” Albert Yonathan Setyawan married spirituality and material imagination, using clay to duplicate the intricate patterns and concentric diagrams of sacred geometries. In Mandala Study #2, 2012, the artist constructed a mandala out of miniature ceramic stupas, covering these forms with white marble sand so
Bangkok: Moe Satt
The performers’ hands dictate their body movements, prompting their arms to stretch out behind their backs into a V shape or to contract to compress their bodies into a cylindrical shape. The two figures eventually join one another on the same screen. The video ends with the performers raising their
Bangkok: Vacharanont Sinvaravatn
In Phu Phan in the Sunset, 2023, he unleashes verdant curves—a wrist-swiveling choreography of jostling, miniscule stubs—over a flatly painted crimson sky. This dispersion conjures a swaying sense of movement, beckoning one to dive into Phu Phan’s layered legacy.
Yogyakarta: Jompet Kuswidananto
In the installation Subterranean Thunder #1 (all works 2023)—with its lupine figure lying prostrate atop a mound of glass shards, as if collapsed midway through a process of therianthropy—Kuswidananto transformed the gallery’s first room into a site of transcendence.
Saigon: Nguyễn Thị Thanh Mai
In Black Landscapes, 2018–20, a single-channel video guides us through a series of dusky, neon-lit sites where floating residences used to be anchored along the Mekong. These haunting landscapes are accompanied by the soundtrack of an old shaman’s scratchy prayer for fish to return to the lake, rendering all the
Singapore: Kristoffer Ardeña
Beneath the paintings’ scabrous and pockmarked facades, one can catch glimpses of facial features, scattered words, and incongruous logos, sprouting from a flower’s stem or inconspicuously planted behind a petal.
Phnom Penh: Kanha Hul
The fabric subtly embeds itself into the background, embracing the figures and offering a lens of translation through which aspects of the women’s individual narratives are accentuated and complicated.
Bangkok: Mit Jai Inn
In a smaller side gallery, a long wooden table hosts the hybrid objects of Mit’s Bangkok Apartments, 2022. Contrary to the main room’s tempest of pigmentation, the colors here have simmered into a more benign palette, evenly spread with a soft, interior-minded hue that resonates with the installation’s title. The
Singapore: Nguyễn Quốc Dũng
In Transgender life, 2017, two life-size nude figures emerge through an intermittent flow of flesh-toned microstrokes atop broad swabs of pastel beige. They appear in awkward poses, hands akimbo or in a stiff recline; their bodies fluctuate between ease and edge, not entirely estranged from the painter yet clearly not
Saigon: Hà Mạnh Thắng
Applying an eclectic combination of materials—ranging from acrylic and charcoal to lacquer and gold leaf—Hà has created a façade of interweaving textures, where epiphanies inspired by poetry commingle with explosive brushstrokes and a vibrant palette.
Hanoi: Lê Quốc Thành
Le’s paintings can be read as attempts to capture on canvas an elusive light through a patchwork of color and a wild array of brushstrokes of varying density, movement, and velocity.