From October 21 to 23, the contemporary art fair Asia Now takes over the courtyards and salons of Monnaie de Paris for the first time. The 88 galleries participating in this eighth edition offer an immersion in the diversity of the current Asian art scene, teeming with talent and technical innovations. Amazing use of ceramics, paintings prepared on the video game The Sims and feminist wall hanging... Discover five works not to be missed.
4. The most feminist: the Citra Sasmita wall hanging
On a three meter long beige wall hanging, a female mythology unfolds from top to bottom : in its center, women fill basins of water, on the sides, some give birth to trees and flowers, while Others generate fire from various parts of their body... In an organization similar to that of Michelangelo's Last Judgment , the artist Citra Sasmita imagines with this work Luminous Opera (2022) a post-patriarchal future by reinterpreting the figure of the passive and/or decorative woman represented in the Kamasan paintings, made on textiles following a tradition of the eponymous Balinese city since the 17th century. A work that the artist, from the high society of Bali, can only exhibit outside of his native country, whose culture still censors raw nudity and the feminist commitment it conveys. Presented at Asia Now, two of her creations explore the iconography of ancient Javanese and Balinese manuscripts to reinvent their motifs – like the snake which, on either side of the works, adopts, according to her, spiritual or patriarchal connotations. – and highlight the figure of a powerful woman close to an original divinity.
