In the slow unfolding of 2025, the contemporary art landscape revealed itself through a constellation of practices that pushed, pulled, and reimagined the boundaries of form, material, and lived experience. Within the evolving ecology of Asian contemporary art, this year unfolded as a site of negotiation between inherited histories and speculative futures, between localized knowledge and global circulation. Rather than a singular movement, 2025 revealed an attentiveness to multiplicity, where artists moved fluidly across geographies while remaining deeply tethered to place, lineage, and lived context.

Below are eight artists who have shaped the trajectory of contemporary Asian art in 2025. Working across sculpture, painting, ceramics, sound, and hybrid modes, each bringing a distinct language to bear on the relevant issues that weighed on us all this year. What binds them is not a singular aesthetic but a shared insistence on art as a space of reflection, rupture, and renewal.

GWON Osang

Seoul-based sculptor GWON Osang continues a decades-long inquiry into what sculpture might become when unshackled from its own traditions. Across his ongoing series, Deodorant Type, The Sculpture, New Structure, and Relief, Osang dissolves the weightiness of classical materiality, replacing it with photographic skin and aluminum frameworks that gesture toward both surface and depth. Within the lineage of postwar Korean sculpture, marked by both material rigor and conceptual restraint, Osang’s practice stands apart for its insistence on hybridity and illusion. In 2025, his work appeared in group exhibitions at institutions like Arko Art Center in Seoul, a year-long collaborative project with Roy Gallery’s new venue PS ROY in Seoul, and was featured at Art Busan with ARARIO Gallery, which has been central to his international representation. Osang’s practice persists in its quiet destabilization of expectations, inviting viewers to feel the present age through the “margin” of sculpture itself.

Kawita Vatanajyankur

Media and performance artist Kawita Vatanajyankur expanded her practice this year into immersive projects that probe the systemic forces shaping labor and the body. Rooted in global capitalism’s unseen mechanisms, the Bangkok-based artist’s ongoing series, such as Performing Textiles and Field Work, alongside new 2025 works like Flight and Echoes, give form to the often invisible lives entangled in production, exploitation, and ecological collapse. Her work resonates strongly within Southeast Asia’s artistic landscape, where questions of labor, gender, and extractive economies are deeply embedded in everyday life. Vatanajyankur’s projects traveled widely in 2025, engaging public consciousness through collaborations with technologists, activists, and researchers. These conversations inspired curators to include her work in exhibitions across Asia and beyond, including Believe in a River at Guangdong’s Hengqin Cultural and Art Center and Protest is a Creative Act at the Museum of Australian Photography. These developments signal a growing institutional recognition of performance-based practices emerging from the region, culminating in preparations for her upcoming solo exhibition at Shanghai’s Yuz Museum in 2026.

Quan Lim

In Singapore, painter Quan Lim emerged in 2025 with The Flood, a major solo exhibition of a new body of work at Cuturi Gallery in Singapore that deepened his interrogation of identity, myth, and narrative fragmentation. Using layered, gestural surfaces and figurative fragments drawn from art history, mythology, and everyday life, Lim’s work inhabits moments of rupture where memory and history collide, where storytelling becomes a way of understanding the self and others. Operating within Singapore’s tightly calibrated cultural ecosystem, Lim’s practice opens space for ambiguity, emotion, and dissent. His paintings this year, dense with allegory and dissonance, reflect a practice attuned to the instability of existence, conveyed through richly textured canvases that resist easy resolution.

Sun Yitian

Sun Yitian is a Beijing-based painter who continued her ascent this year. Her highly detailed depictions of quotidian objects turn toward ever more expansive explorations of desire, commodity, and cultural imagination. Known for hyper-real surfaces that oscillate between seduction and unease, Yitian’s works engage the deep structures of consumer society while reflecting personal history and collective nostalgia. Her 2025 exhibitions, including The Life of Things at Museum Voorlinden in The Hague, As She Descends with Qinhuangdao’s Aranya Art Center, and a solo show Romantic Room at Esther Schipper Gallery’s Berlin space, underscore how artists from China continue to navigate global visibility while retaining a sharp critique of spectacle and excess. This year reinforced her international profile and demonstrated her remarkable ability to render “thingness” itself into a language of the psychological with new, personally resonating depths for the artist.

Dae Uk Kim

Based in Eindhoven, sculptor and storyteller Dae Uk Kim’s practice is a testament to the power of form to articulate the diverse narratives of identity and body politics. Kim weaves personal history with broader ecological and social registers, transforming materials like synthetic hair, ropes, and hybrid forms into embodiments of lived multiplicity. As a Korean artist working across Europe and Asia, Kim’s work reflects a diasporic condition increasingly visible in contemporary Asian art. In 2025, his practice broadened through collaborations with artists and brands alongside public dialogues that animate sculpture as an exchange between body, memory, and environment. His work had been exhibited in shows including Can the Monster Speak? with Delft’s RADIUS CCA, Check In, the Forgotten Guest at Gallery Remicon in Jeju, South Korea, The Tail by Maison the Fuax hosted by Framer Framed in Amsterdam, Fragments of Form at DOEN in Rotterdam, The Body Project presented in Munich, and a solo show with OSISUN in Seoul titled Grandma’s Cabinet. Kim’s work resonates as both introspective and outward-facing, with larger steps towards collective dialogues this year and anticipatory projects that extend beyond the field of sculpture into immersive, interdisciplinary presentations in the future.

Lisa Chang Lee

Working between London and Beijing, Lisa Chang Lee’s interdisciplinary practice this year spanned across sound, ecology, language, and technology. Through field research, installation, and AI-informed processes, her work examines listening as a political and poetic act, attuning audiences to the subtle interdependencies that shape environments and histories. Positioned within broader conversations around environmental degradation and knowledge systems in East Asia, her practice foregrounds care, slowness, and relationality. A founder of the ongoing research platform South of the Sea, Chang Lee’s projects in 2025 spanned institutional exhibitions and ecological storytelling frameworks that emphasize indigenous knowledge and collective listening. A selection of her recent projects was on view this year at the He Xiangning Museum of Art, followed by the Guangzhou Image Triennial and, in 2027, at the Beijing Art, Science, and Technology Biennale. Her work continually foregrounds the entanglement of place, memory, and perception, leveraging her research and interdisciplinary collaborations to ask us to consider how art might become a medium of care.

Takuma Uematsu

Building upon the Fluxus-inspired playfulness and philosophical curiosity that have guided him for decades, Osaka-based artist Takuma Uematsu embraced his move to embody energy and coincidence in his practice this year. Through sculpture, installation, and relational works, Uematsu explores boundaries between object, viewer, and environment, privileging encounter over completion. His practice occupies a unique position within Japanese contemporary art, where humor and conceptual rigor coexist as modes of quiet resistance. His 2025 project, The Sculptor’s Snack, considered the dynamics of everyday materials and communal experience, inviting laughter, reflection, and dialogue, and was presented as part of the WE THE DAY exhibition at the OAG Art Center Kobe.

Yin-chen Li

In Taipei, Yin-chen Li’s ceramics practice this year advanced an intimate inquiry into perception, psyche, and material responsiveness. Blending gestural mark-making with the unpredictable nature of clay and firing processes, Li’s work captures fracture, displacement, and fusion as metaphors for relational dynamics between viewer and form, interior and exterior, control and chance. Within the context of contemporary Taiwanese ceramics, her practice bridges craft lineage and conceptual abstraction. Each piece operates as both trace and threshold, inviting viewers into an active encounter with material embodiment. Her work was presented as part of the Piecing Landscapes: Experience in Layers at Gallery Unfold in Kyoto, featured in the Art Osaka 2025 contemporary art fair, in a solo exhibition titled Next Art Tainan: Hidden Sea at SOKA Arts, and was the Tainan New Arts Award winner.

Across these eight practices, 2025 witnessed art that was simultaneously rigorous and tender. Their work held contradictions without dissolving them, which honored both form and fugitive experience. Seen together, these artists offer a snapshot of contemporary Asian art as a field defined not by uniformity, but by complexity, one shaped by migration, memory, and material consciousness. Whether through the layered narratives of paint, the corporeal provocations of performance and video, the sculptural interchanges of material and identity, or the resonant listening evoked by sound and ecology, this year in contemporary art affirmed a generative possibility: that art’s deepest work remains its capacity to hold us in reflection, and in reflection, to invite transformation.

Review by Shannon Permenter

Shannon Permenter is a freelance writer and art historian based in Arizona. After completing her Masters in History & Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute she has channeled her passion for the arts into a career helping artists, curators, and nonprofits share their work with the world.

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Interviews with Asian Art Contemporary

• GWON Osang: https://asianartcontemporary.com/2025/09/05/interview-seoul-based-artist-gwon-osang/
• Kawita Vatanajyankur: https://asianartcontemporary.com/2025/03/03/interview-bangkok-based-artist-kawita-vatanajyankur/
• Quan Lim: https://asianartcontemporary.com/2025/11/04/interview-singapore-based-artist-quan-lim/
• Sun Yitian: https://asianartcontemporary.com/2025/06/23/interview-beijing-based-artist-sun-yitian/
• Dae Uk Kim: https://asianartcontemporary.com/2025/11/18/interview-eindhoven-based-artist-dae-uk-kim/
• Lisa Chang Lee: https://asianartcontemporary.com/2025/07/15/interview-london-and-beijing-based-artist-lisa-chang-lee/
• Takuma Uematsu: https://asianartcontemporary.com/2025/08/13/interview-osaka-based-artist-takuma-uematsu/
• Yin-chen Li: https://asianartcontemporary.com/2025/06/26/interview-taipei-based-artist-yin-chen-li/