As the art world’s compass continues to tilt, “Asia” is no longer a one-size-fits-all concept stretching neatly from Tokyo to Tehran. This year, Asia NOW invites us to rethink our directional assumptions with the theme My East is Your West—a playful and poignant nod to the cultural relativity of geography. West Asia—more commonly referred to as the Middle East—has stepped into a new discursive and curatorial spotlight. From Beirut to Riyadh, Dubai to Ramallah, the region’s cultural ecosystems are asserting engagement on their own terms. What was once considered a “periphery” is actively reconfiguring the map, reminding us that cultural gravity rarely respects cartographic conventions.
In this spirit, Asia NOW 2025 extends an open invitation to engage with adjacent geographies—bringing West Asia into sharper focus as an integral and generative part of the conversation. This curatorial gesture resists rigid regionalism, instead treating Asia as a mutable paradigm: philosophical rather than purely geographic, plural rather than monolithic. In this post-Western moments, where contemporary art’s traditional centers are increasingly decentered—the fair turns its attention toward more agile, hybrid, and often grassroots-led initiatives across the Middle East. Rather than echoing the familiar narrative of mega-infrastructure and state-driven spectacle, the spotlight here is on the porous, the emergent, and the in-between.