As the Prestige team geared up for Hong Kong’s annual art-athon, we also set ourselves the task of identifying the emerging talents from eight East Asian countries, who should all be registering on your cultural radar this year.
Spilt into four parts and featuring artists from Singapore, Hong Kong, The Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia and China, this round-up will spotlight the inspiration behind the artworks of these creative individuals.
Artists to Watch 2025: Singapore and Hong Kong
Tiffany Loy
Drawn to textiles as an industrial designer, in particular the innate contradictions of thread that both demand microscopic attention and reward macroscopic vision, Tiffany Loy delved into weaving at Kyoto’s Kawashima Textile School and the Royal College of Art in London. Her works have since been exhibited in Singapore and internationally, in venues such as the Singapore Art Museum, the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art and La Triennale di Milano, as well as Milan Design Week and Dubai Art Week. At this year’s contemporary art showcase, SEA Focus in Singapore, Loy presented a new collection made up of pliable sculptures. Constructed from intricately designed interlocking strands that transition into other shades and patterns, they invite viewers to visually trace the threads, examining the details that make up the poetic whole. The largest piece, Plied Colour IV 2048, which is almost 1.7m high, continues Loy’s exploration of tension and depth through the braiding of 2,048 strands of hand-dyed abaca, a fibre made from banana-tree bark; the number of strands refers to a single prime number multiplied by itself 10 times. Loy seeks to test viewers’ perception in her upcoming works. “I’m curious about the limitations of our eyes,” she says. How will she be able to convey a concept if it can’t be seen? It’s a challenge, but Loy says, “It’s something I’m quite excited to explore.” Loy is currently represented by the fine art gallery Sullivan+Strumpf.
Khairulddin Wahab
At the heart of Khairulddin Wahab’s art is his research into colonial history, global trade routes, indigenous culture and how each of these intersect with the natural world. That interdisciplinary focus is evident in earlier works, such as Rite of Passage, which depicts a ghostly group of men waiting for a hot oil bath ritual that would give them strength – it was the UOB Painting of the Year in 2018 – and in his more recent Grand Conjuration, in which tangible and incorporeal realms are blended. In Grand Conjuration, Khairulddin asks viewers to reconsider the artificial divide between humans and the natural world, an idea that plays into his overarching artistic philosophy of enchantment – viewers are invited to be re-enchanted by nature, to counter any disillusionment they may feel with the modern world. Currently represented Khairulddin Wahab, Grand Conjuration (2024) by Cuturi Gallery, Khairulddin has had solo shows in Singapore and group exhibitions in London, Shanghai and Jakarta, with a New York showing later this year. He’s currently studying Southeast Asia’s maritime history, examining how the region’s bodies of water are both a barrier and a global highway influencing its history, culture and understanding of its landscapes. Last year, Khairulddin was selected as one of the world’s 100 Early Career Artists by the art market Artcube.
Hong Kong
Michele Chu
Multi-disciplinary artist Michele Chu uses various materials to investigate subjects of intimacy, ritual and human connection, and the ways in which the body responds to public tension or private introspection. Her Inti Gym installation at Tai Kwun in 2023 encouraged visitors to sit on either side of a division and read questions to each other from a prompt as a way of starting conversation, and getting to know each other by revealing more of themselves in a form of “intimacy training”. In residence in London as part of the Delfina Foundation’s Performance as Process programme in 2023, she further explored notions of loss and grief through the medium of food and multisensory performance. Her 2023 debut solo exhibition, You, Trickling, at PHD Group in Hong Kong, which dealt with confronting loss, was widely acknowledged. An ensemble of tunnels and passageways, the space enclosed the visitor in umbilical recollections of birth, menstruation, excretion and death in pieces imbued with intimacy and vulnerability. It’s a ritualistic masterpiece of a meditative journey that cleanses, soothes and unsettles by turns. Again showing with PHD at Art Basel Hong Kong 2025, she promises an interactive installation that mimics a domestic kitchen to explore themes of cooking and mourning.
Wu Jiaru
Few young painters seem to channel as many references as Guangdong-born Wu, who spent much of her childhood growing up in her mother’s restaurant absorbing cultural and economic influences. Her bold, kinetic, saturated canvases resonate with echoes of Francis Bacon, Alice Neel, Dan Flavin, Kandinsky, Carl Jung, Virginia Woolf and Jadé Fadjutomi – and there’s even a portrait of Kobe Bryant – but somehow at a more accelerated pace. Then there’s the disparate media she uses: digital, video and 16mm film to ready-mades, sculptures and paintings. Her works explore issues such as identity, boundaries, celebrity, technology, beauty, fetish, folklore and the individualisation of history from the perspective of mythology, literature and intimate relationships. Wu has a master’s degree in creative media from CityU Hong Kong, and a BA in fine arts and English from Tsinghua University. She was awarded the Asian Cultural Council New York Fellowship in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include A Brief Digression at HART Haus, Hong Kong; Secrets with an Abundance of Foreign Lines at Flowers Projects in New York; To the Naiad’s House with Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong and Emotional Device at P21 in Seoul. In Hong Kong, she’s also previously shown with Axel Vervoodt, Tai Kwun, Para Site and 10 Chancery Lane. Fresh off her latest solo, Maigré Sea Blessures, at the Mangrove Gallery X Nature Art Centre artist residency programme in Shenzhen, she’s showing Apollo Center with Flowers Gallery during Art Basel Hong Kong 2025, which explores themes of alienation, individuality and the impact of modernisation, and intriguingly includes a monumental painting installation from which viewers are invited to cut out pieces and keep. Yet another Wu coup.
The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.
