Under the evocative title GROW, the 2025 edition of ASIA NOW articulates a vision of art as a fertile ground for transformation, dialogue, and collective flourishing. More than a theme, GROW becomes a framework through which we engage with the shifting landscapes of identity, culture, and belonging, urging us to move beyond the constraints of geographical, historical, and cultural binaries. Growth here is not a singular trajectory but a multiplicity of roots, extending across borders and traditions, entangling the local and the global, the ancestral and the contemporary. 

At the heart of this edition lies an invitation to reflect on how perceptions take shape, expand, and alter the way we encounter each other in an increasingly fluid world. GROW calls attention to the transformative potential of art—its capacity to plant seeds of empathy, to germinate connections across difference, and to cultivate the imagination required for new modes of living together.

Aligned with Leela Gandhi’s evocative concept of “affective communities,” ASIA NOW 2025 foregrounds the fragile, often understated gestures through which bonds of solidarity and friendship emerge. Gandhi reminds us that communities are not forged solely through shared origins or histories, but through unexpected affinities and ethical attachments that cross cultural divides. An artist working with material from their ancestral soil, for instance, may encounter a viewer from another geography who recognizes in that gesture the light of their own memory—whether tied to earth, craft, or ritual. In this moment, an affective community takes root: not grounded in sameness, but in a resonance that links distinct origins through shared sensibility. These affective threads—woven through acts of sharing, listening, and remembering—become essential sites of ethical and aesthetic engagement.