Highlight from Asia Now 2022 - ASIA NOW Paris Asian Art Fair announces a new location at the Monnaie de Paris for its eighth edition. This vast, historic site in the heart of Paris hosts exhibitions of over 75 contemporary galleries showing artists from across Asia and its diaspora, while showing open-air projects, talks and performances. Here is our highlights from the opening on Thursday 20th October.

ASIA NOW Paris Asian Art Fair announces a new location at the Monnaie de Paris for its eighth edition. This vast, historic site in the heart of Paris hosts exhibitions of over 75 contemporary galleries showing artists from across Asia and its diaspora, while showing open-air projects, talks and performances. Here is our highlights from the opening on Thursday 20th October.Highlight from Asia Now 2022

Asia NOW preview on October 20 at Monnaie de Paris (France) © Photography of China - - Highlight from Asia Now 2022

“Asia Now Paris aims to shine a light on contemporary art across Asia – the broader geography, the artists, galleries, institutions and collectors, to provide a European hub where they can participate in a more global conversation during Paris Art Week. Our continuing efforts to focus on various regions, generations and now practices across art communities in Asia positions Asia Now as the leading contemporary art fair dedicated to pan-Asian artists and projects and Asian diasporas.”

Alexandra Fain, Director and Founder of Asia Now

ASIA NOW PARIS is delighted to announce its eighth edition, bringing together 78 exhibiting galleries and 250 artists from 63 countries to present the best of Asia's contemporary art scenes at its new location: the Monnaie de Paris. The historic Paris Mint, housed in an 18th - century palace with open- air courtyards, will be filled with art indoors and out during the fair. This grand setting in the heart of Paris is spread over 1.2 hectares on the Left Bank of the Seine, a short walk across the river from the Louvre and the Bourse de Commerce - Pinault collection. During the fair, this vast venue will be transformed into a creative village. Alongside an increased number of galleries, the fair will host collaborative, artistic, ecological and agricultural projects, including interdisciplinary performances by the Japanese artist Natsuko Uchino, whose practice treats clay as a living form and mixes ceramics with environmentalism, art with architecture.

ASIA NOW continues its mission to explore the diverse art scenes from West Asia to Southeast Asia through more than forty countries from Central Asia and the Subcontinent to the Asia Pacific region. This perimeter refers to the Asia Society's definition. 78 international galleries will take over the entire site to present a selection of the best emerging and established artists from these regions and their diaspora.

Below is our highlights from the opening on Thursday 20th October.

ZETO ART

ZETO ART presents the curatorial project 'A Crack In The Wall' by six artists in 2022. Using different media, they portray the wall as an image or a vehicle to leave a mark. We are constantly building walls, forming our own structures of existence and developing our sense of space. Walls are the borders we can reach, and these borders constitute the space and universe in which 'I' am. The cracks in the walls, or the light and shadows, are the traces we leave behind in the process of building our own selves, and the fragments we leave behind when we break the universe of our selves.

The wall is a barrier and a chasm, a dilemma and an order. As our souls wander through it, we inevitably need to retreat and take refuge. At this moment, we destroy the barrier, cross the chasm, escape the dilemma and break the order. At this moment, we have A Crack In The Wall.

PARIS-B

The booth of PARIS-B would be featuring the works of two chinese artists : Fu Site and Zhuo Qi, both represented permanently by the gallery.

Fu Site’s pictorial language borrows the codes of the oneiric world, to give life to scenes that open the field of interpretation By subtly combining fragmented images and overlapped narrative layers, Fu Site knows how to provoke a certain ambiguity on our perception of time, depriving the scene of any logical coherence.

Zhuo Qi fuels his artistic practice with the daily experience of the semantic and linguistic miracles generated by cultural gap and its long history of misunderstandings. Through his sculptures, Zhuo Qi aims for a shape that will make one smile, provoke astonishment, a shape that will fit the most the subject it is attached to. Those subjects are reproductions of antic chinese sculptures that the artist collects whenever he visits China. Often damaged by time, these sculptures are broken, fractured or dismembered. Zhuo Qi tries his best to fix them, in his own special way, by adding blown glass to the broken parts. By doing so, he successfully marries two materials that are radicaly different : softness is mixed with toughness, ancient hugs modern.

PARIS-B booth © Photography of China - - Highlight from Asia Now 2022

LIUSA WANG

For Asia Now 2022, LIUSA WANG is pleased to present Fan Xi, Musquiqui Chihying, and Zhao Duan’s work.

Musquiqui Chihying’s work « The Looty » is a NFT work. The name of this work is derived from a pekingese which was plundered to the West by the British-French alliance after the Opium War. The dog’s real name was nowhere to find; nevertheless, the British royal family gave it a new name, Looty, which precisely reflected its contradictory political roles: being a plundered loot and a survivor in a disaster at the same time. The work, “The Looty”, turns the image of Looty into a non-fungible token for remembering this event and also rethinking how new technology can change the forms of collections and visual narrative communication. This NFT work will be shown via holographic projection. Zhao Duan’s work « Cent titres » which is created under the social distancing measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. She portrayed each person she invited by painting their face in the palm of their hands, then transferred the images by pressing their hands on plexiglass, thus traversing the crevices of the skin folds, with white holes in the form of a mask in the hollow parts of the palms. The result is an imposing set of « no face », masked faces which seem to float without a body, like ghosts wandering in the in-between, neither dead nor alive, neither present nor absent, displaying disturbing strangeness. She chose one of these portraits to « repair » the mouth part and shows it for the first time in ASIA NOW.

Exhibition views

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More information:

ASIA NOW 8th edition

20 - 23 October 2022

La Monnaie de Paris, 11, Quai de Conti - 75006 Paris
www.asianowparis.com