water~copy~air~streak (2025) by Pratchaya Phinthong installed in an abandoned fish market in Phuket, which never opened as such but was later used as a “shelter for transient communities experiencing housing precarity.” Commissioned for the 2026 Thailand Biennale, the work speaks to non-human economies and the politics of cohabitation.
The cicadas are deafening on Yanui Beach in southern Phuket. They almost drown out the low hum of tourists who, clad in snorkeling gear, are eager to glimpse the few tropically colored fish that remain in waters now largely stripped of coral, though still impossibly turquoise. The cacophony of consumptive leisure continues inland, as sunburnt bodies drift into Phuket’s old town replete with Michelin-approved restaurants, massage parlors, and endless souvenir shops staged in 19th-century Sino-Portuguese shophouses. For most who pass through, this version of Phuket is all there is to see. Some create a version, where crowds are edited out and images of which are sent home on picture perfect postcards. But beneath these images lies a place that has long been shaped by other forms of hosting. Shaped now by a hospitality economy that emerged four decades ago, Phuket has long been beholden to the conditions of another form of hosting.
With records dating back to the 11th century, Hokkien communities from Fujian, driven by poor farmland and environmental precarity, took to the seas in search of opportunity. As traders of porcelain, silk and tea, they moved across the South China Sea for centuries. In 1820, Hokkien arrived on an island called Junk Ceylon, a name the Portugese derived from “Ujong Salang,” or the Cape of Salang that the Indigenous Malay and Sea Gypsies once called their home. Not long before Southern Chinese ended up in California to work on the railroads and mine for gold, the Hokkien ended up in Phuket, taking over the formerly Dutch led (though never colonial) tin mining industry. With their new riches, the Hokkien tin barons established networks of Confucian, Buddhist and animist temples, mixing with the Islamic deities worshiped by the Malay. Here, hybrid Peranakan (Hokkien-Malay) architectural, spiritual, and culinary styles took root. Long before Phuket became a site of leisure, it was a site of migration, extraction, but also exchange. Its identity formed through continuous negotiation between host and guest.
During my recent visit to the Thailand Biennale, Eternal [Kalpa], curated by artistic directors Arin Runjag and David Teh, with support from curators Hera Chan and Marisa Phandharakrajadej, the artworks (many by artists new to me) found me asking: what does it mean to replicate images of oneself (the host) so that their consumption by others (the guest) allows for the host’s survival? What happens when the hosts’ performed identity is expected and fetishized by the guest? When one’s livelihood is bound to hosting, what does the guest lose in their experience of the place where they’re visiting? What does it mean to be a better guest?
I once worked for the painter Liu Xiaodong, who remarked, while reflecting on histories of violence on Chinese in Indonesia, “ghosts linger where the air is thick. It’s in the 空气 (atmosphere) where the spirit has space to live.” In places like Phuket, these ghosts are not merely aesthetic traces or exoticized remnants, but unresolved histories of migration, labor, and belief. They all continue to structure a present-day Phuket that exists beneath the artificial sheen of the postcard image – they are the hidden hosts. To encounter a place only through what hospitality offers is to miss the reality of the hidden host entirely.
Hospitality, at its core, is an act of care. But under the gaze of the tourist, it can become a performance shaped by expectation, where “at your service” subtly reproduces an extractive dynamic. My question, then, is not whether to reject being a guest, but how to be a different kind of guest. What does it mean to arrive without insisting on the image prepared for you? What are our responsibilities as a guest if I recognize recognize that I, too, am entering into a system of relations as a guest?
Perhaps, to see Phuket not as a destination in the “East,” but as a place “West of Here,” is to unsettle this gaze. It is to move through it less as a surface to be consumed, and more as a living system where, like a Möbius strip, past and present fold into one another. In doing so, we begin to understand that to be a guest is not simply to receive, but to relate: to histories, to people, and to the conditions that make hospitality possible at all.
Zandie Brockett 张桂才
Founder + Artistic Director, West of Here
Moving beyond hosting, at Eternal [Kalpa]…
FILM
Badak (2025)
RIAR RIZALDI
A film about the evolution of industries in the southern Malay peninsula of Phuket and the production of an image of nature to extract nature’s resources. In the early 1800s, the Hokkien tin barons dominated the economy, but by the 1980s, the Thai government realized the depleted tin mines would no longer sustain the growing island population, and decidedly shifted its production of nature into another form: the crafting of an image of itself in the postcard perfect island destination. In a place that has constantly been extracted from: first minerals from nature, and now an image of nature, the Indonesian artist Riar Rizardi explores the tension of worldviews: Islamic deities and Chinese miners, Western tourists and the Peranakan hospitality industry. What happens to our conception of time when a colonial logic collides with an ancestral time?
UNTOLD HISTORY
The Throne and the Crown (2025)
NATHALIE MUCHAMAD
Nathalie Muchamad is a Nouméan artist whose work excavates the history of material culture from textiles to chairs. In her Biennale commission, she examines the parang motif (one of Java’s oldest batik forms), the lifecycle of the dingklik, a stool once central to Javanese trade, and also the iconic Peacock Chair that has come to represent Black power, thanks to the famed portrait with Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton. Her work reveals a reality with a more contentious history. Prior to its appropriation by colonial and postcolonial cultural figures, the Peacock Chair was once produced by inmates at the Bilibid Prison in Manila. Once the largest site of incarceration in the Philippines during the American colonial occupation from 1898 to 1946, these wicker chairs were created by inmates as a part of their “reform” process, which “prepared inmates for useful citizenship [through manual labor] that would teach them to be productive and civilized members following their sentences.” These products were sold as souvenirs from the island paradise to American tourists.
PERFORMANCE
ANCESCAPE (2025)
MELATI SURYODARMO
How is the body a vessel of memory that continuously holds the vestiges of geopolitical trauma also be a site of transformation? How do unspoken histories inform our identities as members of different societies? Set in a lush magenta field of sand and black water, Filipino artist Melati Suryodarmo’s Biennale landscape, which includes a video of her three-hour performance, invites visitors to consider embodied grief. Within tunnels of black textile, audiences are welcomed into the performance by reflecting on: What do we hold at a cellular level? What can we let go of? How does the present become a moment for us to acknowledge our values and vantage points informed by our place in the world? And, how can we find new ways to reconstitute them?
… more from across a region just West of Here…
SPACE
S→U→I→T→E
This new ‘self-organizing’ space in a former Shanghainese office building breathes fresh air into the increasingly gentrified French Concession. Josh Klein’s pointed arrow towards New York real estate as the culprit behind a dearth of independent artists spaces operating without bias towards market demands, is not wrong. In markets like Shanghai, despite staggering rent, landlords at least allow their empty buildings to be occupied by art practitioners like those behind SUITE.
For SUITE’s first exhibition, London-Lahore based Saba Khan presents ways of living by the Gujjar nomads in South Asia, with research tracing how the colonial and post-colonial legacies of infrastructure development on the Indus River impacted the Gujjar’s migratory patterns. The multimedia installation models Pakistani bureaucrat offices and utilizes materials like cinderblocks as the housing unit for video screens, nodding at the generic and sterile administrative infrastructure that regulates nomadic and natural migration patterns. SUITE is collectively organized by Kathleen Han, Lyu Yuedi, You Yiyi, Damien Zhang.
EXHIBITION
ZHENG MAHLER @ PhD
Open through May
In the age of automation, how do we remove the gaze of the LLM and return the perspective to another intelligent knowledge system, this time one from the natural world? Collective Zheng Mahler (established in 2009 on Lantau Island by artist Royce Ng and anthrozoologist Daisy Bisenieks) explore the possibilities when nature and technology intersect in their recent exhibition Mushroom Clouds at the Hong Kong gallery, PhD (Property Holdings Development) Group.
By creating a vivarium with various mycelial spores and fauna from across Lantau Island, the mini biosphere becomes a generative and collaborative closed system producing a set of data (i.e. humidity and temperature stats). As the mycelia network grows over the course of the exhibition, these data points train the LLM model to produce an image of itself: the fungi, projected back into the vivarium. Paired with a series of gorgeous color penciled drawings of different fungal forms, the works gestures toward a possible future where technology’s consciousness is trained beyond language and towards a multi-species empathy.
BOOK
STAY CONNECTED: ART and CHINA since 2008
This quarter, we spotlight an exhibition catalog, one co-published by Asia Art Archive and Tai Kwun Contemporary for an exhibition presented in two parts: Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud (Sept. 2025 - Jan. 2026) and Stay Connected: Supplying the Globe (Feb. - May 2026), both presented at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong and curated by Pi Li and Ying Kwok. This catalog (edited by Pi Li, Ying Kwok, Anthony Yung, Huang Wenlong, and Daniel Szehin Ho) unites both exhibitions into a dictionary-esque object organized in eight chapters: Technology and the Internet, Frontiers, Histories, Labor, Surviving, Geoscapes and Beings, Diasporas, and Unruly Spirits. More importantly, this catalog indexes an incredibly prescient time in China in the wake of 2008: the year of the Beijing Olympics, the Financial Crisis, Obama’s first term. It marked the height of an era when China was the factory of the world, the Chinternet was born, the Great Firewall grew, and a robust, underground and subversive communities of resistance emerged. Amidst the rampant urbanization and booming art markets, was a sensibility of art-making that only happens once in a generation. The catalog is published in English and Chinese and can be purchased in the Tai Kwun bookshop.
… And in the ancient ceramic town of 景德镇 Jingdezhen
ARTIST
虎口 TIGER MOUTH
The 山海经 (shanhaijing), also known as the Classic of Mountains and Seas is an ancient Chinese compendium of myth, geography, and cosmology that maps known and imagined worlds starting in China and expanding outward. As an encyclopedia of mythical creatures, gods, plants, animals, diseases and medicines, and ancient peoples, it has long served as a foundational text of Chinese animist belief and culture.
Tiger Mouth is an emerging ceramicist based in Jingdezhen who tells the stories of the Classic one animal at a time. Using a technique where he layers colors of clay onto each other, he then carves out the animistic demons and spirits, from 鯈魚 (tiaoyu), a red chicken with three tails, six feet and four eyes, whose meat, if eaten can make one forget sad memories; to 狐狸精 (hulijing), a hedonistic and clairvoyant fox spirit that transcends yin and yang through beguiling deceit; to 女娲 (nuwa) the mother goddess who molded humans from clay and fixed the pillar between Earth and the heavens.
COMMUNITY
POTTERY WORKSHOP
Founded by the Hong Kong ceramic artist Caroline Cheng, Pottery Workshop (PWS) is an incredible hub for the ceramics and glass blowing community in Jingdezhen. Having first started as a workshop that housed a residency for international artists, PWS has grown into a full institution that hosts a weekly marketplace for a select group of talented ceramic artisans, as well as a gallery, cafe, and tool shop. Most recently, Caroline is building Yi Design, a sustainable design brand that upcycles used porcelain into bricks for residential and commercial builds. Curating through the noise of the booming tourist sector in Jingdezhen, PWS reveals a world of unique artisan craftsmanship and circular economies that deal with the waste from being a manufacturing site of the world.
SPACE
MAOHUA GALLERY
Tucked into the still functioning 740 factory district on the outskirts of Jingdezhen, the city that birthed porcelain, is 冇华画廊 (Maohua Gallery), a small gallery representing some of the best emerging ceramic craftsmen in China today. The gorgeous former factory space turned exhibition hall is a site for inquiry around all things porcelain: from the classic wood burn 蔡少 processes to new glazing processes. The knowledgeable founders He Xizi and Lao Xiao are both curators of the exhibitions as well as managing the boutique within the compound that sells smaller, more affordable pieces.
Maohua Gallery is on WeChat, but have a small presence on
OTHER WEST OF HERE PROJECTS + PROGRAMS
Image Courtesy Ruvan Wijesooriya
ENCODED was nominated for two Webby Awards!
Last year, Amplifier hired West of Here’s Zandie Brockett as the Executive Producer of an incredible guerrilla initiative that retold a story of American history. ENCODED invited 17 Indigenous artists from across Turtle Island to reinterpret and reclaim 25 sculptures in The Met Museum’s American Wing through augmented reality. It was a defining moment that presented a possibility that, through technology, ALL communities and their voices can be included in the cannon. Voting has ended but fingers crossed!
A Final Thought
Dark secrets, previous identities, some within us, some inherited from generations ago, so many of us have past lives that, for a myriad of reasons, we choose to bury.
I finally got to see Andrew Thomas Huang’s The Deer of Nine Colors in person, installed on a Chinese opera stage in the 200 year-old Kathu Shrine, a Buddhist temple where the Nine Emperor Gods are worshiped.
The stunning Buddhist sci-fi reveals what happens if we can see into our past lives to learn from our ancestral selves. In a haunting dynamic between a hunter and the hunted, Huang speculates on what happens when we honor our ghosts, holding space to host their presence, inviting their sensibility into our contemporary identities today. The Chinese goddess Guan Yin reminds us:
“YOU MUST FIND YOUR TRUE NAME. ONE CONQUERS A DEMON BY NAMING IT.”
…only then will we be freed.
Until next time, warm wishes from somewhere
