There is a moment, before you know what something means, when you simply touch it.

A hand pressed into the earth. The smell of rain rising from the ground. The sweat of land after the sun has touched it.

The soil holds these cycles, but it does not explain itself. It is still, yet it remembers. The seasons, the sickle, the seeds. What grows, what is harvested, what is taken away. It receives everything and, over time, transforms it into something else. Something that remains. Something that acquires value.
Perhaps that is why soil feels like a second skin. It gets under you. It carries the kinship of generations past. Beneath its surface, histories accumulate through what has been planted, cultivated, harvested, and displaced. Things we no longer see, but somehow continue to live with.

The fruits of memory seem to begin here. In the rambutan of yesterday’s news.

In discarded fire clay, becoming a collective form. In plants and flowers, growing where wild things roam. In that “mussel memory,” a piece of the migrant sea carried home from somewhere you once belonged to.
`We keep these things because they remember for us. They hold stories that exceed their material form: different histories, different movements, different methods of making and belonging. And for a moment, they meet, sharing the same ground.

Like soil, they become part of us, leaving traces that linger long after time has passed. Their value is not always immediate or measurable. It accumulates through attachment, use, memory, and even decay. It is a value formed through the relationship between things and the lives that pass through them.

What settles deepest, we call sentimental value: a form of value shaped by what we inherit, what we encounter, and what we choose to carry forward. It is this idea that informs the curatorial approach of the 12th edition of Asia NOW, crafting a space not simply of transaction, but of relationships, community, continuity.