Table of contents for Almanac 2026 in ArtAsiaPacific Almanac

The art industry faced a reckoning in 2025. From July onward, a cohort of mid-to large-scale galleries contracted, closed, or fundamentally retooled their operations. Tim Blum announced he would “sunset” his eponymous gallery after more than three decades, closing permanent spaces in Los Angeles and Tokyo, shelving a planned Tribeca outpost, and laying off most of his staff. Venus Over Manhattan followed suit, with founder Adam Lindemann winding down the 13-year-old enterprise. In August, Clearing, long hailed as a bellwether for emerging practices, shuttered its New York and Los Angeles locations after 14 years, while Tanya Bonakdar Gallery chose not to renew the lease on its Hollywood outpost, ending a seven-year run in the city. October brought news that Almine Rech would close its London space after more than a…

As the Israel-Palestine conflict continued to wreak havoc in 2025, ideological disputes flared across the world, with institutions and artists pulled to both sides of the fence. Early fault lines appeared in February when Documenta released a controversial new code of conduct: a heavyhanded clampdown on antisemitism following its turbulent 2022 edition that critics argued effectively preempted pro-Palestinian positions. In March, Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari signaled her stance by turning down the Wolf Prize for Architecture, awarded by the Israel-based Wolf Foundation, in protest of the atrocities in Gaza. May brought further flashpoints: CIMAM, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art, publicly condemned what it described as censorship of Palestine-related art by Australian institutions, following Creative Australia’s decision in February to drop Khaled Sabsabi, a staunch advocate…

Throughout 2025, artists and cultural figures across the globe were celebrated with major accolades. In July, American sound artist Christine Sun Kim received the inaugural Radical Transformation Award, presented by the Henkaku Center at Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan. Tibetan collective Khadhok clinched this year’s Rubin Museum Himalayan Art Prize, while Taipei’s Hong Foundation conferred its Tung Chung Prize Special Achievement Award to Taiwanese American performance artist Tehching Hsieh. President and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, Hoor Al-Qasimi, was honored with the Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French embassy in the UAE. In Australia, Yolŋu artist Gaypalani Waṉambi won the Telstra Art Award in August, with Sydney-based artist Sophie Cape receiving the Hadley’s Art Prize that same month. Meanwhile, First Nations artist and…

Art is a perennial dance. Following 2025’s vortex of disruptions, 2026 brings continuing seismic vibrations as the global art ecosystem recalibrates. Institutions and biennials, from a fresh crop of shuttered galleries to new public commissions on the Gulf’s sun-scorched sands, each grapple with reinvention and programs laced with the quiet urgency of transition. Museums worldwide will continue their cycle of opening, closing, and reopening. While the Centre Pompidou’s Paris flagship begins a EUR 460 million (USD 535.7 million) metamorphosis, due to re-emerge in 2030, its second Asian outpost is set to debut in May 2026. This new venture, a collaboration with Hanwha, will reside within the Korean chaebol’s 63 Building skyscraper in Seoul. Across the Atlantic, New York’s New Museum will also emerge from its chrysalis as the next year…

For Ho Tzu Nyen, histories are neither linear nor contained. They are fragmented, multiplied, and often resistant to the authoritative narratives imposed by empires and colonizers. His work draws on archival materials but feels like spectral archaeology, revealing what official records have obscured or mythologized. 2025 brought Ho’s inquiries to new geographies and scales. In February, “Time & the Tiger” opened at Mudam in Luxembourg, revolving around two motifs: time as nonlinear, characterized by loops and returns, and the tiger as an embodiment of recursive, epoch-traversing time. The following month, “Three Stories: Monsters, Opium, Time” was unveiled at Kiang Malingue in Hong Kong. The exhibition’s top floor featured Timepieces (2023), which comprises 43 individual screens cycling through durations from one second to 24 hours. Each screen holds its own rhythm,…

In Dhikr (2025), part of Han Mengyun’s film installation Suffering Hands, Broken Thread commissioned for the inaugural Bukhara Biennial, Uzbek women in a textile factory sit close to the ground, bodies folded in focused intensity. Their fingers move like rapid breath—swift, insistent, almost involuntary—as they maneuver their looms, each pluck and pull forming muted percussion. The soundscape expands into a quiet polyphony: the hum of machinery, a whirring fan, distant traffic, a baby’s soft wail. Every shot is composed with the precision of a painter’s eye, yet the work’s potency lies less in image than tempo. Layered rhythms—of labor, learning, and persistent, patient making—emerge as Han’s operative grammar, threading gesture and thought across bodies and borders. This rhythm is inseparable from Han’s long apprenticeship in languages—including Chinese, English, and Sanskrit—and…

In the global art imagination, Seoul has become synonymous with energy and ambition—a “new art capital to watch.” Once considered an emerging hub, the city has transformed rapidly over the past five years, fueled by the postpandemic art-market boom, the arrival of Frieze Seoul, and an influx of international galleries seeking a foothold in Korea. Yet beyond the spectacle of fairs and the rhetoric of the “Korean Wave” (also known as Hallyu or the “K-wave”), deeper questions surface about sustainability as well as the long-term impacts of cultural diplomacy and a nationalized “K-Art” brand. The proliferation of spaces and institutional enthusiasm has made Korea a closely watched scene in East Asia and abroad, but in 2025 the atmosphere felt different. If last year cast Korean art as “the thing of…

Recently, it seems that Bangkok and much of Thailand have operated in a paradoxical temporality, looking both into the past and future with equal intensity. The most visible trend has been a renewed national appetite for archives and the rearticulation of Thai art history. February saw the official establishment of the archive for Project 304 by Asia Art Archive. One of Thailand’s most influential alternative art spaces from the 1990s, Project 304 was co-founded by Gridthiya Gaweewong, who received the 2025 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. In the second half of the year, “Chumpon Apisuk’s Lifeworld” at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC) presented an archive of works by the eponymous artist who pioneered performance art in Southeast Asia, introducing “happenings” to the Thai contemporary art scene in…

The global art fair landscape in 2025 seemed perpetually on the verge of a mutiny. Tim Blum’s closure of his Los Angeles and Tokyo galleries became a flashpoint: despite selling 85 percent of his Art Basel in Basel booth in advance, he reported no meaningful conversations at the fair. “We are in the midst of a paradigmatic shift,” he declared. While some maintained that the market remained fundamentally intact, the year’s closures told a different story. Most notably for Asia, Taipei Dangdai’s cancelation of its 2026 edition following a 40-percent drop in exhibitors revealed a landscape in flux. Uncertainty and Flux The recalibration was evident in Seoul, where the fourth edition of Frieze Seoul saw 40 galleries not return, including established international players Michael Werner, Karma, and Sadie Coles HQ.…

In Shilpa Gupta’s StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream (2021), two suspended flapboards deliver a frenzied stream of oracles. Their letters clatter nervously, forming brief, broken, and poetic, if not occasionally unsettling, messages—“MORE POWER/MORE FEAR,” “RAID HISTORIES/ERASE VOICES”—before the next alphabetical convulsion begins. The motion-based work was part of Gupta’s first solo exhibition of the year, “Lines of Flight” at the Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai, which exemplified the Mumbai-born artist’s interest in power structures that tacitly define and erode our existence—whether through technology, surveillance, demarcation, or language. Gupta had a busy year, taking part in more than a dozen international group exhibitions, unveiling a permanent light installation in Doha, and contributing to festivals in Canada, the UK, and Macao. In February, she was the subject of two solo shows: one at New Delhi’s Bikaner…

For someone who has spent two decades perfecting the art of slow, imperceptible infiltration, Uzbek filmmaker and artist Saodat Ismailova has had a paradoxically prolific 2025—five major solo exhibitions, over 15 group shows, and three awards. Yet this quiet recognition mirrors her strategic invisibility. After her major institutional survey closed in January at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca, Ismailova presented “Abyss Between Two Mountains” at Museu Amparo in Mexico. From multichannel projections on silk that dissolve post-Soviet Uzbek landscapes into imperial mirages to fragile fabrics billowing from the earth’s troubled core, the exhibition was a spectral cartography of erasure. In “As We Fade” at Kunsthalle Lissabon, a doublechannel film traced the human entanglements of the sacred Sulaiman-Too Mountain. Ismailova’s archival footage bleeds into reverent silence, weaving an entrancing elegy that lingers like…

This year, the global wave of populism reached Taiwan in the form of sweeping cultural funding cuts. A radical faction within the Kuomintang unexpectedly seized procedural control of the legislature, advancing a populist agenda that—under the banner of “fiscal discipline”—triggered unprecedented reductions in public funding. The Ministry of Culture’s USD 923 million annual budget saw a USD 35 million cut and a further USD 108 million frozen, despite a year of record tax revenues, while one pro-China legislator dismissed cultural subsidies as mere “begging,” recasting cultural labor as parasitic on the state. Despite much public outcry over the cuts, especially among artists dependent on government support, little analysis has situated this particular dispute within a wider pattern of global cultural institutions teetering on a populist precipice. A rare attempt—or at…

On January 7, just as the art world was awakening from its annual slumber after Art Basel Miami and the winter holidays, two separate, massive wildfires on opposite sides of town struck Los Angeles (LA). The Palisades and Eaton Fires decimated more than 35,000 acres of land in total—destroying over 12,000 structures, displacing 200,000 people, and resulting in 31 deaths. The local artist community was deeply impacted: Kelly Akashi’s home and studio was burned to the ground, her Skutt ceramic kiln the only thing left standing. Organizers of the city’s largest and flashiest art fair, Frieze LA, were teetering on canceling the event altogether in light of the metaphorical and literal dark cloud still blanketing the city in February. Some of the artists who were affected by the blaze insisted…

The global economy has endured a prolonged winter, yet art organizations continued to push forward—amid rising operating costs, political volatility, and uncertain cultural appetite. In mainland China, a mix of nonprofit, private, and brandbacked institutions expanded the ecosystem. In November, Chanel and the Power Station of Art in Shanghai unveiled Espace Gabrielle Chanel, mainland China’s first public contemporary art library, offering access to books and resources focused on global contemporary art. Elsewhere in the city, Cheruby House launched as the flagship of Cheruby, founded in 2024 by collector Cherry Xu to connect fashion and contemporary art through exhibitions and residencies. In the Greater Bay Area, the Shenzhen Bay Culture Square, a 51,000-square-meter design complex by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects opened in November with eight inaugural exhibitions, including Anthony McCall’s…

As global auction houses claw out of a prolonged correction, Asia reasserted its buying power for top-tier material in New York. Regional centers are consolidating their auction ecologies, while Hong Kong has reset to ground zero—its growth from 2018 to 2021 driven by conditions that no longer hold. Ground Zero Hong Kong’s debut “marquee week” in September, which saw the three international houses staging sales in the same week for the first time, brought in a combined total of HKD 1.5 billion (USD 190.6 million)—an “eight-year low,” according to South China Morning Post, and barely a third of the HKD 4.2 billion (USD 544.1 million) realized at the Asia market’s peak in spring 2021. Within this diminished playing field, with the days of Covid-era frenzied trading long past, Christie’s has…

In Ayoung Kim’s speculative universe, delivery riders navigate algorithmic mazes, their bodies split and multiplied through game engines and AIgenerated sequences like glitches in capitalism’s fever dream. Her protagonists—Ernst Mo and En Storm—embody what Kim calls “technoprecarity,” where platform metrics colonize human consciousness. In Kim’s parallel worlds, multiple temporalities coexist, love and antagonism entwine, and human feelings become “unhygienic”—the artist’s term for emotions that refuse the sterile logic of optimization. Fresh from her LG Guggenheim Award in February, Kim’s first European solo exhibition “Many Worlds Over” at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof transformed the museum into a labyrinth of digital exhaustion, examining how algorithmic control fractures bodies and desire. Ghost Dancers B (2022) features two life-sized riders frozen mid-grapple amid shattered glass, blurring the line between conflict and embrace, while Ghost Dancers…

With the shrewd eye of an anthropologist, Gala Porras-Kim appraises ancient relics and other neglected cultural items to interrogate the ethical, historical, and spiritual dimensions of museum collections. Through hyperdetailed drawings and mixed-media installations often involving unconventional materials—dust, mold, and even human remains—she gently upends the clinical taxonomies that shape institutional practices, positing artifacts as conscious entities rife with extant meanings and agency. The Colombian-Korean-American artist began 2025 with “A Hand in Nature,” a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, probing conservation policies dedicated to fending off pernicious atmospheric phenomena. Here, she embraced these undesirable elements through copal resin sculptures soaked with local rainwater, as well as canvases from her Signals series (2021–) made using dehumidifiers that gathered and released moisture onto graphite-coated fabrics, resulting in dark,…

Singapore is quietly but unmistakably shifting from cultural waypoint to regional art node, drawing repeat visits from international audiences. Its art calendar has transitioned from episodic marquee events to a more steady, continuous rhythm, featuring an expanding constellation of ambitious institutional projects, commercial platforms, and increasingly confident homegrown practices that signal a more rooted, self-sustaining ecosystem. Anchored by SG60, Singapore’s diamond jubilee, 2025 saw institutions scale up while reframing national legacies within global contexts. The National Gallery Singapore opened “Singapore Stories: Pathways and Detours in Art,” a new permanent exhibition that re-examines the local canon through more inclusive lenses. Meanwhile, “City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s–1940s” highlighted Asian artists’ overlooked influence in interwar Paris, recasting modernism as cross-cultural exchange rather than Western export though still centering Paris as…

Sounds of ecstatic revelry pervaded the opening of the long-awaited Istanbul Biennial in late September, as the Turkish art world mingled with partygoers in high fashion in the neoclassical 19th-century Palazzo Corpi, now known as Soho House. The decadent, philhellenic building pulsed with energies that have long been waiting for release, both creatively and intellectually, in a city still caught up in national political scandal as Istanbul’s mayor and presidential hopeful continues to languish in jail. The 18th edition, helmed by Lebanese curator Christine Tohmé and titled “The Three-Legged Cat,” will unfold in three phases until 2027, prioritizing long-term sustainability and community engagement over parachuting biennial-globetrotting. Moreover, the programming overtly zeroed in on Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West’s naked complicity through powerful works such as Khalil Rabah’s…