ArtReview Asia Summer 2026

The Summer issue of ArtReview Asia looks to artists who challenge the dominant, extractive, colonial networks and narratives imposed on bodies and environments. Cover artist Priyageetha Dia works across time-based media, digital animation and installation to explore decolonial feminism and the obscured labour histories of Southeast Asian plantations, while exposing, Adeline Chia writes, ‘the oppressive and extractive structures under which modern life takes place.’ Shaunak Mahbubani considers oceanic memory – as explored through art, Indigenous knowledge, ecological histories and maritime violence – as a way to resist the manufactured amnesia that allows war, colonialism and environmental destruction to continue. Shirin Neshat and Shahrnush Parsipur discuss the enduring afterlife of Women Without Men – from its censorship in Iran to its translation into film – and its continued relevance to Iranian women, exile, war and the role of artists in times of crisis. Meanwhile, Fi Churchman considers the work of Uzbek filmmaker Saodat Ismailova, whose films attend to the cultures, ecologies and occluded histories of Central Asia – a region profoundly marked by Soviet industrialisation – and the ‘gap between what once existed and what remains’; and Stephanie Bailey speaks to Shuruq Harb, another artist working with moving image, about Palestinian history and forms of storytelling that exceed the frame of politics. Also in this issue, Pallavi Surana thinks the Indian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale raises both intended and unintended questions about what constitutes ‘home’; Yiyi You explores Beijing Gallery Weekend; and Max Crosbie-Jones reports from Cambodia’s coast, where a new artist residency tests the overlap between art, marine conservation, tourism and development. Plus reviews from around the world including Seoul, Taipei, Bangkok, Mumbai and Hong Kong, as well as reviews of books by Bassem Khandaqji, Megha Majumdar, and Ali Kazim and Hammad Nasar.