Afterall

Afterall is delighted to announce the next iteration of our writing workshops in Southeast Asia.

Our inaugural 2021 workshop ‘Terms and Conditions of Writing and Publishing Art in Southeast Asia’ aimed to facilitate peer learning and experiment with diverse or new forms of art writing and publishing amongst researchers, artists and writers across the region. Our cohort were 23 participants based in Bangkok, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Phnom Penh, Yangon and Yogyakarta, selected from 107 applicants by open call.

Our 2024–5 workshop ‘Art Writing and Publishing in Southeast Asia: Sustainable Ecosystems and Infrastructures’ – which took place in Phnom Penh – developed new convivialities, research ecosystems and infrastructures for sustainable art and research cultures, including the New Writing publishing platform launched in August 2025.

Our 2026 workshop ‘Art Writing and Publishing in Southeast Asia: Collectivity and Land Issues’ emerges from the shared interests of our writing workshop participants, reconnecting with the participants of the 2021 and 2024–25 programmes to further develop our co-learning framework; to dive into research-writing focusing on collective practices and land issues; and to collectively develop plans for how the programme should move forwards. It will take place in Quezon City, Manila this June.

The 15 participants joining us in Manila are Lara Acuin, Dini Adanurani, Vincent Ardidon, Roma Estrada, Prapan Jangkitchai, Nuttamon Pramsumran, Vân Đỗ, Hung Duong, Lyna Kourn, Moeng Meta, Lk Rigor, Akmalia Rizqita, Ibrahim Soetomo, Ariane Sutthavong and Beverly Yong.

This project is supported by Writing Workshop Alumni Grant. Afterall editors Wing Chan Adeena Mey and David Morris are hosting the programme with our friends Thanavi Chotpradit Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez Tram Luong .luong Brigitta Isabella, Arianna Mercado and Lyno Vuth

PhD Funding Application
Resurgent Places: Practice-based Repair Across the West Asia and North Africa Region
Partnership: Central Saint Martins and Mosaic Rooms
Director of Studies: Dr Elisa Adami

Overview
The region spanning West Asia and North Africa (WANA) has historically been – and continues to be – made and unmade through colonial, extractive and militarist violence as well as through the imposition of discursive frameworks produced elsewhere. If in 1978 Edward Said identified ‘orientalism’ as the nineteenth-century knowledge system that paved the way to the Western colonisation of the ‘Middle East’, contemporary forms of ‘geographical profiling’ continue to portray and define the region as ‘a site of sectarian violence, of petroleum capitalism and a dumping ground of imperialist debris’ (Yıldırım, 2023).

Environmentally, the WANA region sits largely within an arid to semi-arid climate zone stretching from Mauritania to Central Asia. Its fragile ecosystems are vulnerable to drought and desertification – risks further compounded by global warming. This advancing ‘aridity line’ has been characterised as a ‘conflict shoreline’ where climate change and political conflict intertwine (Weizman and Sheikh, 2015). This intersection of colonial/military violence and environmental risk is a typical case of ‘group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’ (Wilson Gilmore, 2017) in the sacrifice zones produced by racial capitalism.

We invite applications that advance place-(re)making practices as modes to address/redress these palimpsests of social, spatial and environmental injustices across the region, specifically those caused by the intersection of wars, colonisation and climate change.

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OUT NOW: Issue 58 – Geo-Imaginaries of Technology

Conceived during a period of rapid and often unchecked technological development, the current issue of Afterall aims at reconsidering and expanding our understanding of what ‘technology’ is. A multifarious category, we approach technology here as always embedded within and informed by the particular conditions of the geopolitical, cultural and environmental contexts in which it is used and developed. Through this situated approach we hope to move away from a Eurocentric concept of technology and to make room instead for the multiple perspectives which shape what philosopher Yuk Hui calls ‘technodiversity’.

Exploring an array of disparate technologies – ranging from AI and cyborgs to bioengineering and surfing – as well as diverse geocultural contexts, the issue includes contributions from Li Qi , Ingrid Pui Yee Chu , Christin Yu , Filipa Ramos , Joël Vacheron , Nicolas Vamvouklis and Dorota Jagoda Michalska. It features artists Lawrence Lek , Lee Bul .bul , Revital Cohen .e.v.i.t.a.l.c.o.h.e.n and Tuur Van B***n .vanbalen , Sojung Jun, Im Heung-soon , Flaka Haliti and Kateryna Lysovenko.

On the occasion of the publication of this issue, we have made freely available on our website ‘Natural Causes: The Deaths and Afterlives of Art at the Digital Precipice’ by Ingrid Pui Yee Chu and ‘A Method with Plasticity: Sojung Jun in Conversation with Nav Haq & Adeena Mey’.

Our third episode in this series is with Mike Fok , an Yixing teapot collector and consultant. Ha Bik Chuen was known as a collector and hoarder of all sorts of things such as books, photographs, documents, to name but these. Reflecting on the drive of collectors and hoarders and in an associative move that expands from Ha to other collecting practices in Hong Kong, Afterall editor spoke to Mike Fok about his lifelong passion for Yixing teapots and Chinese tea culture. Mike shares how his journey began more than twenty years ago, when a taste of aged pu’er tea sparked his curiosity. The search for good tea soon led him to teaware, and eventually to the world of Yixing clay teapots – renowned for their craftsmanship and unique brewing qualities.

He recalls starting out in Hong Kong’s markets and on early online platforms, before realising that much of the best material had already been collected in the 1980s and ’90s. His quest took him further afield, to mainland China, Japan and Thailand, where he encountered antique teapots and learned from handling real examples. For Mike, using teapots daily – washing, touching and brewing – is the key to understanding their qualities, much like testing different sound systems with music, a learning process akin to how Ha taught himself to make motherboards through tactile experiences.

Follow Mike on instagram at

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Our second episode in our podcast series in collaboration with .hk is with and from the Yogyakarta-based collective Hyphen— . Founded in 2011, Hyphen— is a research initiative that puts forward curiosity and common wellbeing as the estuary of artistic practices. Their work is most often focused on practices from and in Indonesia, bringing historical legacies into dialogue with contemporary concerns, work that has taken various forms, from exhibitions and publications to jam sessions and radio broadcasts. For this episode, Grace and Intan are in conversation with Afterall research fellow and editor David Morris. We explore how their work as part of Hyphen— extends some of the questions of Reframing Strangeness on different practices of history: how and why do we remember? How are creative legacies cared for, carried and brought into the present?

Stay tuned for Hyphen—’s Danarto research on hyphen.wed.id.

Commercial
‘From Jerusalem to Armageddon’ from Nayamullah Station. The book can be downloaded for free via Project MUSE.

Musics
‘Arena Semangka’ by Nayamullah

Homemade tunes by David Morris and baby Maia

New Writing series

We’re excited to launch New Writing, an online publishing platform that centres new voices in the field of art writing dedicated to complexifying narratives around art in a global context. The contributors are part of the community of writers we have been building via our writing workshops series supported by since 2021. The workshops have been co-facilitated by Wing Chan , Thanavi Chotpradit , Brigitta Isabella, Trâm Lương .luong , Adeena Mey , David Morris, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez , Simon Soon and Vuth Lyno .

Visit our website to read the latest articles: ‘Changes in the Cambodian Contemporary Art Scene and tiSamjort’s Community-Centred Vision’ by Danielle Khleang and Lyna Kourn , ‘The Passive Gaze’ by Roma Estrada and ‘A Feast of Sound’, ​​Nguyễn Trinh Thi in Conversation with Hùng Dương .

We welcome these new voices and appreciate the fresh perspectives and questions they have brought to us. Stay tuned for updates on this platform.

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Podcast series: Afterall x Para Site, Reframing Strangeness
Episodes airing between July and September 2025

In collaboration with Para Site, Hong Kong .hk , as part of the exhibition ‘Reframing Strangeness: Ha Bik Chuen’s Motherboards and Collagraphs’ (2025), Afterall have initiated a series of conversations with artists, curators and scholars. The exhibition reframes Ha’s motherboards from functional tools to aesthetic objects. We depart from Ha’s unconventional printing practice to generate new interpretations and intergenerational conversations, extending from Hong Kong to the world beyond.

Focused on Hong Kong-based artist Ha Bik Chuen’s printmaking practice, ‘Reframing Strangeness’ stages a selection of his ‘motherboards’, a term Ha coined to designate the printing plates he labouriously assembled from wood and other found materials to produce over 3,000 editioned collagraphs. In this first episode, Afterall editors Elisa Adami and Wing Chan talk to the exhibition’s curator Michelle Wun Ting Wong . We explore how the materials the motherboards are made of can help us read Hong Kong’s history from the 1970s and its changing landscape.

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📕Out now: Sung Hwan Kim: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea by Janine Armin

In A Record of Drifting Across the Sea, Sung Hwan Kim parses and reanimates the archival and embodied traces left by undocumented Korean migrants who on their way to the US at the turn of the twentieth century took up residency in Hawai‘i. Comprising multiple chapters (some still in progress), this ongoing film and installation series unsettles the limits of the ‘one work’. In her speculative inquiry, Janine Armin illuminates the stories of non-sovereign coexistence between indigenous and migrant communities that Kim’s work points us towards.

This is the fiftieth title in our One Work book series, which focuses on artworks that have significantly changed the way we understand art and its history.

📗Also available now: a Korean edition has been published by Hyunsil Publishing . The book was translated by Jinjinni Han and Maya West.

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NoteBook – In the Fabric of Resistance: Htein Lin’s ‘Escape’ at Ikon Gallery

MRes Art: Exhibition Studies student Ana Luisa Cubas reviews ‘Htein Lin: Escape’ at Ikon Gallery Birmingham and discusses how Lin’s practice, rooted in Myanmar’s political turmoil – from prison-made paintings to cast hands of political prisoners – navigates political resistance and collective suffering.

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[Image: Htein Lin, Biology of Art (1999). Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist.]

Talk: Writing and Publishing Ecosystems

14th April 2025, 3-5pm
National Taipei University of Education (NTUE)

On 14 April Afterall researchers David Morris and Wing Chan will give a talk exploring recent and upcoming research and publishing activities of the Exhibition Histories series, ‘Writing and Publishing Ecosystems: Afterall’s Exhibition Histories Series’. The talk will take place between 3-5pm, hosted by and NTUE’s Critical and Curatorial Studies of Contemporary Art.