The Voices Shaping Contemporary Asia.10 Artists to Know from Asia NOW 2025.
Author: Sydney Smith

Asia NOW returned to the Monnaie de Paris for its 11th edition with renewed energy and expanded scope. Under the theme Grow, this year’s edition encouraged viewers to move beyond the East-West binary and consider what it means to come from a place and to be shaped by its culture and history. 

What began as Europe’s first fair for Asian contemporary art, Asia NOW has grown from 18 to nearly 70 galleries and broadened its reach from East Asia and West Asia to the Middle East. Guided by the mission of “My East is Your West”, this year’s fair challenged East-West stereotypes, positioning “Asia” less as a fixed geography and more as a methodology – a versatile, and at times insurgent, approach to thinking and creating.

Against this backdrop, we selected ten artists whose practices stood out in October. Their work offers new ways of fostering connection and understanding – discover them below.

Rusudan Khizanishvili

Georgian artist Rusudan Khizanishvili (b. 1979) creates vivid, symbol-laden paintings which draw on Georgian iconography, regional history, and folklore. Raised in post-Soviet Georgia and based in Tbilisi, she channels both ancestral memory and the region’s turbulent past into dreamlike, altered realities populated by hybrid figures and chimeric forms. Her compositions echo the theatricality embedded in Georgian culture, animated by an intuitive approach to colour – “brainwaves,” as she describes them – that heightens the mystical and emotional charge of her imagery. 

Across her work, Khizanishvili explores cultural memory, the female body, and myth, drawing on archetypes, ecofeminist thought, and an evolving interest in transhumanism. Women appear as protectors, warriors, and shape-shifters, their patterned garments and symbolic armour recalling both ancient goddesses and the legacy of Queen Tamar. These figures reflect the artist’s own experience of growing up with a single mother in a patriarchal society while forging her own independent artistic path. She was represented by LJ Galerie at Asia NOW 2025.