ArtReview Asia Summer 2026

The Summer issue of ArtReview Asia looks to artists who challenge the dominant, extractive, colonial networks and narratives imposed on bodies and environments. Cover artist Priyageetha Dia works across time-based media, digital animation and installation to explore decolonial feminism and the obscured labour histories of Southeast Asian plantations, while exposing, Adeline Chia writes, ‘the oppressive and extractive structures under which modern life takes place.’ Shaunak Mahbubani considers oceanic memory – as explored through art, Indigenous knowledge, ecological histories and maritime violence – as a way to resist the manufactured amnesia that allows war, colonialism and environmental destruction to continue. Shirin Neshat and Shahrnush Parsipur discuss the enduring afterlife of Women Without Men – from its censorship in Iran to its translation into film – and its continued relevance to Iranian women, exile, war and the role of artists in times of crisis. Meanwhile, Fi Churchman considers the work of Uzbek filmmaker Saodat Ismailova, whose films attend to the cultures, ecologies and occluded histories of Central Asia – a region profoundly marked by Soviet industrialisation – and the ‘gap between what once existed and what remains’; and Stephanie Bailey speaks to Shuruq Harb, another artist working with moving image, about Palestinian history and forms of storytelling that exceed the frame of politics. Also in this issue, Pallavi Surana thinks the Indian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale raises both intended and unintended questions about what constitutes ‘home’; Yiyi You explores Beijing Gallery Weekend; and Max Crosbie-Jones reports from Cambodia’s coast, where a new artist residency tests the overlap between art, marine conservation, tourism and development. Plus reviews from around the world including Seoul, Taipei, Bangkok, Mumbai and Hong Kong, as well as reviews of books by Bassem Khandaqji, Megha Majumdar, and Ali Kazim and Hammad Nasar. Art Previewed The Interview Shahrnush Parsipur and Shirin Neshat Gallery Weekend Beijing by Yiyi You India in Venice by Pallavi Surana Cambodia’s Shifting Sands by Max Crosbie-Jones Art Featured Priyageetha Dia by Adeline Chia The Way of Water by Shaunak Mahbubani Saodat Ismailova by Fi Churchman Shuruq Harb by Stephanie Bailey Against Venice by Régis Debray annotated by Chris Fite-Wassilak and J.J. Charlesworth Art Reviewed Exhibitions & Books Spectrosynthesis Seoul, by Mark Rappolt Poet Tang Chang’s Institute of Modern Art, by Max Crosbie-Jones Park Chan-kyong, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Ju Young Kim, by Mark Rappolt Tidal Weavers: Islands Exchange, by Panthea Lee Kawita Vatanajyankur, by Max Crosbie-Jones Oototol, by Adeline Chia Hung Hsien, by Ilaria Maria Sala Im Youngzoo, by Jenny Wu Threading Inwards, by Ilaria Maria Sala Cian Dayrit, by Nirmala Devi Faan1jik6 Zi1gaan1 (In Between Translations), by Stephanie Bailey Sunhil Sippy, by Mark Rappolt Disobedience Archive (Canopy for Broken Time), by Asya Yaghmurian 61st Venice Biennale, by Jenny Wu Brutalist Korea: A Photographic Tour of Post-War Korean Architecture, by Paul Tulett, reviewed by Nirmala Devi A Mask the Colour of the Sky, by Bassem Khandaqji, translated by Addie Leak, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Love Magic Power Danger Bliss: Yoko Ono and the Avant-Garde Diaspora, by Paul Morley, reviewed by Chris Fite-Wassilak Snow, by Sohrab Hura, reviewed by Fi Churchman A Guardian and a Thief, by Megha Majumdar, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Alphabet Book, by Ali Kazim and Hammad Nasar, reviewed by Mark Rappolt