Pacita Abad (b. 1946, Batanes; d. 2004, Singapore) was born to a family of politicians and activists in Batanes, the furthermost-north island state in the Philippines, and sent to the US to finish her graduate studies after political violence initiated by Ferdinand Marcos put her life in danger. Abad settled in San Francisco in 1970.

Widely recognised for her use of colour, something she remained adamant about from her early studies, Abad pioneered new forms of materiality in her work. This is exemplified by her celebrated trapunto paintings, a form of quilted painting, which involves stitching and stuffing her painted canvases instead of stretching them over a frame. Her oeuvre featured an immense array of subject matter, from tribal masks and social realist tableaux to lush and intricately rendered underwater scenes and abstractions. Accumulating materials, techniques and subjects from her extensive travels, oftentimes in the same composition, Abad explored modernity’s uneven development with the greatest care, as a figure born outside of the metropole. Her work predates contemporary discourses around postcolonial feminisms, globalisation and transnationalism, offering an intuitive understanding of the mutability and heritability of traditions in the places she lived.

K Allado-McDowell is a writer, artist, musician and a pioneering figure in the field of AI literature. Since 2020, they haveauthored several books with GPT-3, co-edited and contributedto multiple anthologies and regularly publishessays on art, AI and ecology.

K established theArtists + Machine Intelligence programme at Google in 2015. They created the neuro-operaSong of the Ambassadors, which premiered at Lincoln Center in 2022. Their first solo exhibition, The Known Lost, was presented atSwiss Institute in NYC in 2025.

K has spoken at TED, The Long Now Foundation, New Museum, Tate, Serpentine Gallery, HKW, Moderna Museet, Christie’s, MacArthur Foundation, MfN Berlin, Ars Electronica, Sónar and many other venues, and has taught at SCI-Arc, Strelka and IAAC.

alyene is a visual artist from the Sakha Republic. She has ancestral ties to both the Kolyma region and Tuymaada Valley. Her practice engages with the continuation of storywork, memory, attentive forms of knowledge that move through gaps and distances, personal and familial histories and land-based relations, alongside archives and media. She is currently based in Rotterdam.

Bernice Bing (b. 1936, San Francisco; d. 1998, Philo) was a trailblazing Chinese American painter whose work navigated the intricacies of cultural and sexual identity, informed by her personal experience. Born in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Bing faced the dual struggle of assimilating into American life while seeking a connection to her Chinese heritage. Known affectionately as Bingo, she explored themes of identity and cultural assimilation through her work.

Bing’s artistic journey began with early exposure to drawing, which provided her a connection to her cultural roots while living in white foster homes and studying at a predominantly white school. Her formal education included studies at the California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute, where she was influenced by notable artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff and Saburō Hasegawa. Hasegawa’s integration of Zen principles and Asian techniques profoundly impacted Bing, prompting her exploration of abstract expressionism and Eastern philosophies. She also endeavoured to attain a knowledge of Chinese and Asian art practices and methods, studying with Hasegawa, travelling to Asia in 1984 and practicing Buddhism in her late life. In painting, she found a language with which to explore the theme of the complexity of identity and what it means to assimilate cultures. As an independent-minded queer Chinese American woman artist, Bing fell outside the norms of the art world of her time and her due recognition has mainly occurred posthumously.

Chen Zhe (b. 1989, Beijing) approaches artistic practice as a search for integration amid separation. By pressing against thresholds where body and consciousness struggle to reconcile, and where language and experience fail to coincide, she seeks to understand how one might inhabit finitude as it is lived.In Chen’s work, the body serves not only as a vessel of perception, but as the site of transformation. She explores how time, trauma, desire and belief inscribe themselves in the body, and how these invisible forces acquire form through it. This perspective is deeply informed by literature, anatomy and Jungian psychology, drawing upon the symbolic systems of astronomy, divination, alchemy and ritual practice. Often unfolding as long-term projects, Chen’s practice spans photography, sculpture, installation and publication. The projects collectively form an ongoing journey of discovery and return.

Chen received her BFA in photography and imaging from ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles. Her works has been exhibited at Lillehammer Art Museum (2022); UCCA Dune, Qinhuangdao (2021); Yokohama Triennale (2020); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden(2019); White Rabbit Gallery (2019); the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art(2018) and others.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos (Tehuacán) is a Mexican film collective founded in 2012 to dismantle the commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its embedded ideology. The collective is inspired by the historical avant-gardes and their commitment to using both form and content against alienating realities. Their methods combine digital and analogue mediums, interventions into archival materials, mythology, agitprop, social protests and documentary poetry. Their radical experimentation with documentary and cinematographic devices produce images—both visual and auditory—that are political possibilities in their own right.

Recent screenings and workshops include ICA London, The Rotterdam Film Festival, The Toronto Film Festival and the Brakhage Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, among many others. Their work was presented at the Museum of Modern Art as part of their Modern Mondays series, Tate Modern Film Series, The Block Museum, Conversation at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film forum, Museum of the Moving Image, The Flaherty Film Seminar, the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento in Buenos Aires (BIM).

Stephanie Comilang (b. 1980, Toronto) is a Filipina-Canadian artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. She graduated with a BA from the Ontario College of Art & Design University. In her work, Comilang engages themes of labour, technology and postcolonial entanglement in the context of global mobility. Combining documentary footage, fictional elements and personal narratives, she describes her films as ‘science fiction documentaries’.

With a focus on the migrant experience, Comilang considers the growing disparity between the human and the global. Comilang creates films whose narratives are driven by multiple voices and points of view to consider how culture and society engage with such salient aspects of the globalized world as mobility, capital and labour. Recent solo exhibitions include Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2026); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2025); CARA, New York (2025).

Sara Flores (b. 1950) lives and works in Peru and is part of the Shipibo-Konibo, an Indigenous people spread along the Ucayali River. Her complex, intricate geometric works express the practice of Kené – an ancient medium that is central to the artistic expression of the Shipibo-Konibo nation. Flores’s artistic practice is rooted in the traditions of her ancestral and cultural heritage and informed by the interconnectivity of the Amazonian ecosystem. Through the matrilineal and intergenerational practice of Kené, Flores inherits both the technical knowledge and philosophical principles affiliated with the medium. She applies prepared natural dyes sourced from her immediate environment to create labyrinthine configurations that map neural, psychological, elemental and ecological networks.

Gauri Gill (b. 1970, Chandigarh) is a Delhi-based photographer. Gill’s complex practice contains several lines of pursuit, which include a more than two-decade-long engagement with marginalised communities in rural Rajasthan called Notes from the Desert (since 1999). In her recent body of work, Acts of Appearance, (2015–), the artist has worked closely with papier-mâché artists of the Kokna and Warli tribes in Maharashtra, using unique new masks to tell fictional stories of contemporary life in the village. Working in both black and white and colour, Gill addresses the identity markers of gender, caste, class and community as determinants of mobility and social behaviour; in her work there is empathy, surprise and a human concern over issues of survival.

She has exhibited within India and internationally. Her first major survey exhibition opened at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, in 2022, and travelled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk in January 2023. Gill’s work has been shown at Tate Modern, London (2025); The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2024); Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (2024); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2023); the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); Chennai Photo Biennale (2021 and 2019); Chobimela, Dhaka (2019); MoMA PS1, New York (2018); Documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017) and more. She received the prestigious Prix Pictet award for photography and sustainability in 2023. In 2011, she was awarded the Grange Prize, Canada’s foremost award for photography; and in 2002 she received the Fifty Crows Award (formerly called the Mother Jones) in San Francisco.

Pao Houa Her’s (b. 1982) artwork is rooted in stories of migration, desire and belonging. Through photography, video and site-specific installation, Her stays attentive to the shifting nature of memory, multi-directional time and simultaneous truths related to Hmong intergenerational and transnational experiences. With a trickster intention, she addresses colonial histories and aesthetics to rescript authenticity and representation. Her is an assistant professor of photography and moving images at the University Minnesota. She holds an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art (2012) and a BFA in photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2009). She is the recipient of many fellowships and grants, and her works are found in public collections across the United States and Southeast Asia.

Hanna Hur (b. 1985, Toronto) lives and works in New York. Hur received an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. Hur’s artistic practice constructs transcendent visual fields through geometric precision, spanning painting, drawing and sculpture forms. Her works are intricate yet evanescent, resembling hallucinatory visual identifications or spectral abstract constructions, guiding viewers into a meditative state as if participating in a specific ritual, thereby forming a unique ‘rational mysticism’. Her creations often rest upon repetitive labour, manifesting in meticulous grid construction in her paintings or copper chainmail sculptures handwoven over years, transforming time and sanctity into visible material traces.

Dorothea Lange (b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey; d. 1965, San Francisco) was a prominent American documentary photographer and photojournalist. In 1919, at the age of 23, she opened a successful portrait studio in San Francisco. As the Great Depression transformed American society, Lange turned her attention from studio portraiture to documenting the lives of those affected by poverty, labour unrest and economic hardship.

Driven by a commitment to social justice, she joined the Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Her photographs often isolated their subjects from their immediate surroundings, creating powerful images that conveyed the universal realities of rural poverty and migrant labour. During the Second World War, Lange also documented the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans, producing some of the most enduring visual records of this profound injustice.

The legacy of Georgia O’Keeffe (b. 1887, Sun Prairie, Wisconsin; d. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico) as an American art icon and a pioneer of twentieth-century art is widely recognised. O’Keeffe used her art to record emotional and sensory experiences, especially her responses to the rhythms and forms of the natural world. She made her debut in 1916 and was immediately recognised as a trailblazing artist. In the summer of 1929, O’Keeffe made the first of many trips to northern New Mexico, where she moved permanently in 1949. The stark landscape and Native American and Hispanic cultures of the region inspired a new direction in O’Keeffe’s art. O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings coincided with a growing interest in regional scenes by American modernists seeking a distinctive view of the nation.

Natalia Papaeva(b. 1989, Buryatia) is an artist working across language, performance, video, drawing and immersive installation. Her practice brings together personal memory, embodied knowledge and political realities, forming layered environments where these elements intersect. Born in Buryatia, Siberia, her work is shaped by experiences of cultural and linguistic displacement, reflecting on the ongoing impact of colonial histories on Indigenous languages and ways of being. Resisting fixed or ethnographic framings of culture, she approaches identity as dynamic and in constant transformation.

In Papaeva’s work, language extends beyond words into gesture, rhythm and image. Often beginning with text—remembered, inherited or imagined—her works unfold into spaces where multiple languages coexist and meaning remains fluid. Songs, voices and landscapes become carriers of thought, emotion and social reality. Understanding making as a form of thinking, she creates installations and performances that approach belonging as something continually constructed, something that is felt as much as understood.

Rometti Costales was an artistic duo formed by Julia Rometti (b. 1975, Nice) and Victor Costales (b. 1974, Minsk), active between 2007 and 2022. Working between France, South America and Mexico, where they eventually settled, the duo developed projects exploring non-Western ontologies through fiction and speculation, treating nature as a site of political inscription. Their work was presented in solo exhibitions at institutions including Museo Jumex and SAPS Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (Mexico City), Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Santiago), CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid), Kunsthalle Basel and Midway Contemporary Art (Minneapolis), among others.

Since 2022, Julia Rometti has continued to deepen this thinking through an independent practice based in Mexico City. She makes exhibitions where elements, materials and speculations become characters that colour one another in a fringe of unarticulated affinities. She was nominated for the Gapado AiR residency in South Korea, and her recent solo exhibitions include PEANA (2024, Mexico City) and a commissioned work for Museo Tamayo (2024, Mexico City). She is currently preparing a solo exhibition at La Tallera, Cuernavaca. Victor Costales has since moved into a different field, currently running the Mexico City restaurant-bar Kabak Mirumir, having previously founded Veri Bari.

Shao Fan, art name: Yu Han (b. 1964, Beijing), lives and works in Beijing. Born to a renowned family of artists, he studied painting with his mother and father from a young age. Since the 1990s, his artistic practice has spanned a wide range of mediums, including three-dimensional works, oil on canvas, ink on rice paper, garden design and architecture, exploring the transformation of materials across different times, spaces and states of consciousness.

Recent solo exhibitions include Shao Fan: The Nature of Things, Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou, 2026; Shan Fan: Refrain, White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, 2026; Shao Fan, Art Basel Paris, 2024; In the Name of the Rabbit, Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou, 2023; The Ink of Yu Han, Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne, 2021; Shao Fan: Between the Truth and Illusion, Het Noordbrabants Museum, s-Hertogenbosch, 2020; YOU, Ludwig Museum Deutschherrenhaus, Koblenz, 2018; YOU, Suzhou Museum, Suzhou, 2018.

Võ An Khánh (b. 1936, Ninh Quoi, Bac Lieu Province; d. 2023, Bac Lieu) is most well-known for his striking black-and-white photographs of the Vietnam War, and their testament to human resilience. During the 1960s and early 70s, he travelled with a guerrilla unit to document the front line of the Vietnamese resistance against the US in the Ca Mau region. He also managed the photography department of the local revolutionary cause and documented events related to frontline music and dance events.

Between 1962 and 1975, Khánh staged a photography exhibition in the exceptionally challenging condition of mangrove forests. His two well-known photographs Mobile Military Medical Clinic and Extra-curriculum Political Science Class were included in this travelling show, which he developed on the spot using natural light. Khánh’s photographs have been included in the exhibition Another Vietnam: Pictures of the War from the Other Side in 2002 (co-organised by the International Centre for Photography, New York) and various other international and local exhibitions and publications, including Is it morning for you yet?, the 58th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, 2022–23; Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia, National Gallery Singapore, 2022–23.

Anh Vo (b. 1995, Hanoi) is a Brooklyn- and Hanoi-based Vietnamese choreographer and writer working in the expanded field of performance. Their practice mobilises the naked body in its variations to make explicit the entanglement of power and apparitional forces that cut across flesh. Their work emerges from the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental performance, Hanoi performance art and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Vo is indebted to Miguel Gutierrez’s unapologetic queerness and amorphous excess, Moriah Evans’s speculative commitment to the depth of interiority, Julie Tolentino’s durational poetics of intimacy, Juliana May’s improvisational wizardry, Tehching Hsieh’s existential sense of time, and Ngoc Dai’s guttural sonic landscape of post-war Vietnam. Their formal training is in performance studies, studying with esteemed theorists and practitioners at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Vo is currently an adjunct instructor at Cooper Union.

Tuguldur Yondonjamts (b. 1977, Ulaanbaatar) explores languages between tamed and untamed worlds. Tuguldur received a BFA in Mongolian traditional painting (Thanka) from the Mongolian University of Arts (1997) and graduated with a degree in fine art from the University of the Arts, Berlin (UdK) in 2004. He earned an MFA from Columbia University in 2014. His works have been shown internationally, including at the 61st Venice Biennale (2026), Ulaanbaatar Biennale (2025), Thailand Biennial (2023), Asian Art Biennial Taipei (2021) and Gwangju Biennale (2020). Solo exhibitions include Gallery Ver Bangkok (2026), National Art Gallery of Mongolia (2023), Berkshire, Reese and Paul Galleries, Indianapolis (2021), Arts Catalyst London (2018). Group exhibitions include the Drawing Center, NYC (2016, 2017), SculptureCenter, New York (2016), Para Site, Hong Kong (2017), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2024) and Singapore Art Museum (2024). His work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and KADIST, among others.

Zeng Xiaolian (b. 1939, Yunnan) is a professor-grade illustrator at Kunming Institute of Botany, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, a member of China Artists Association and was the chairperson of the Botanical Scientific Illustration Society of China, Botanical Society of China. He is widely recognised as the foremost pioneer of botanical scientific illustration in China.

From the 1950s onwards, Zeng collaborated with more than 300 plant taxonomists and 164 illustrators over 45 years to produce Flora of China, one of the world’s most comprehensive botanical reference works. Throughout his 60-year-career, he has created over 2,000 scientific botanical illustrations for major research publications.

Combining the traditions of natural history illustration with Western realism, Zeng’s work balances scientific precision with artistic sensitivity. He believes botanical illustration must accurately convey the defining characteristics of a species while possessing its own aesthetic value, finding beauty through faithful observation of nature itself.