One of the ways we might understand the future of culture is through art. Art gives you a view into what some of the world’s leading minds are thinking about. The medium answers some of the most important questions in culture: What issues are becoming important to artists, curators, and creatives? How are these points of concern being translated into painting, sculpture, sound, photography, graphics, or filmmaking? At an even more fundamental level: How are forms of expression actively changing in real time? And why?

Understanding art means understanding where the world is headed.

Enter Adam Insight’s newest bite-sized report: THE FUTURE OF ART IN ASIA. We asked some of the leading curators in our city what aesthetic and art trends are rising, what visual and aesthetic styles feel particularly “of the moment,” and what forces—social, economic, political—are shaping them.

Through a series of mini-essays, we’re looking into the perspective of the region and how its players are envisioning the development of the Asian art scene.

EXPERTS INTERVIEWED:
1. Daniel Ho, Executive Editor @ CONG Journal.
2. Renee Lui, Curator @ N+ Museum and
3. Joseph Chen, Director of Culture @ Eaton HK
4. Kenny Li, Director of Culture @ Heath Mall
5. JY Yan, Insights @ Inner Chapter; ex-Social Media Lead @ Radii
6. Eunice Tsang, Curator @ M+ and Current Plans

NOTE: this report is much easier to read on desktop/email.

One direction I think will continue moving from contemporary art into wider visual culture is a cluster of overlapping tendencies: ritual, “ancestral” or “traditional” references, ecological thinking, and material intensity.

Over the last few years, strands that once felt distinct have increasingly appeared in combination. What is emerging is not a return to tradition, but a highly contemporary field shaped by atmosphere, bodily presence, and symbolic charge. Many artists work through video, sound, performance, installation, and digitally aware image-making, even when drawing on older cosmologies or inherited forms.

This feels especially pronounced in Southeast Asia. Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines come to the fore, because artists there often move fluidly between spiritual symbolism, vernacular forms, performance, and contemporary media.

Part of the reason is a growing sense that the thinking and visual languages of the recent decade no longer fully answer the present moment. Climate anxiety has made urgent the questions of land/sea, material extraction, and the given state of the world. At the same time, many artists seem drawn to symbolic systems that sit outside modern rationalism alone, outside of the “Western Reason”—cosmology, ritual, myth, and older forms of knowledge become ways of thinking through uncertainty rather than simply quoting tradition. In a more visibly multipolar world, these references no longer feel peripheral.

If Southeast Asia often approaches this through indigenous thinking, postcolonial memory, or ritual forms that remain legible to a broader audience, in the Sinosphere the same search often arrives differently. In China, one sees artists turning toward internal regions such as the Northeast and Southwest (and Zomia), looking beyond a simple nation-state frame through border histories, peripheral landscapes, and local temporalities. Others move through myth and image systems in more mediated ways:

Within many national contexts, these tendencies are sometimes treated as peripheral rather than central—tied to border regions, older knowledge systems, or non-dominant histories. For that reason, they may sometimes gain traction internationally before they do domestically, where an outside gaze reads them simultaneously as distinctly Asian and unmistakably contemporary.

If this cluster of symbolic and conceptual references enters the mainstream, it will probably do so less as contemporary art than as atmosphere: denser textures, ceremonial moods, and imagery that feel both very much tied to a history or tradition and yet appear to be of the present moment.

We’re seeing a return to materially rich, technically rigorous practices — characterised by muted palettes, layered textures, and conceptual depth, often engaging with historical and cultural discourse as a counterpoint to hyper-pop and digital aesthetics.

Technically dense, detail-oriented works with muted colour palettes; heavily textured, object-driven practices with a sense of patina and historical resonance. A renewed interest in surrealism, particularly in its more introspective and symbolic registers, alongside emerging neodeco tendencies—marked by ornamental precision, stylisation, and the reinterpretation of historical references through a contemporary lens. Practices that emphasise materiality, symbolism, and layered meaning.

Driving this is a growing fatigue—and underlying anxiety—around AI and the proliferation of low-quality, algorithmically generated content. As digital spaces become saturated with fast, two-dimensional imagery, there is an increasing awareness of consumption habits and a corresponding desire for works that offer intellectual, cultural, and material depth. This shift reflects a broader move away from “content” toward art that demands time, attention, and contemplation.

This shift signifies a broader return to humanistic values in both art and society. At a moment when AI increasingly mediates visual culture and social media accelerates consumption into “brain rot,” these practices reassert the value of slowness, material presence, and critical engagement.

What’s one art trend I think will become mainstream in 2026? Systems thinking as aesthetic practice. We’re moving from identity as the dominant framework of contemporary art toward a deeper interrogation of the infrastructures that produce identity in the first place: the algorithms, logistics networks, colonial archives, platform economies, and institutional machineries that quietly determine who gets seen, how, and on whose terms.

The visual language is already coalescing: multi-channel video installations that map networked systems, speculative world-building that uses game engines and generative AI as a structural metaphor; working with the archive and counter-archival practices that treat history as a system to be reverse-engineered. What these share is an interest in the apparatus. It’s less about expressing a self but rather it’s about exposing the conditions under which selves are made legible or erasable.

Identity as an art world currency has run its course not because the questions it raised were resolved, but because institutions learned to absorb and commodify it. Representation became a kind of programming strategy. The critique was neutralized by the market it was critiquing. What systems thinking does is go one layer deeper, and crucially, it implicates the institution itself. That’s harder to fully domesticate. The broader context matters too: gig economy precarity, AI restructuring what labor and authorship mean, platform capitalism making the infrastructure of daily life newly legible and newly alarming. Artists are responding to a moment when the machine is no longer background noise — it’s the main character.

The questions it’s asking are the actual questions of the moment. When the infrastructure of existence is increasingly what determines life chances, art that makes that infrastructure visible and subvertable becomes more necessary than ever. The shift from identity to systems becomes a more precise political instrument. Identity told us who was marginalized. Systems asks what is doing the marginalizing, and whether we can break it open.

But there’s a necessary caveat. Systems-oriented art carries its own risk of co-optation, perhaps a deeper one than identity work, because it can be absorbed as methodology rather than just content. The art world is itself a system, and systems thinking is already becoming a curatorial language, a grant category, a fair programming strategy. Poliks and Trillo’s Exocapitalism (2025) offers the useful diagnosis here: capital has outgrown human control and governs itself, mutating faster than any critical apparatus built to contain it. The machine assimilates the map of the machine and adds it to the collection. The most urgent question for artists working in this mode is whether systems thinking can stay sharp once it goes mainstream.

Joseph Chen:

The art world is currently suffocating under the burnout of the didactic and criticality. Exhibitions have been checking boxes of diversity and inclusion, claiming to make social and environmental critiques, which drove to an overload of intellectualizing.

Audiences are looking for another way to connect to art with sense and affect. Because of that, vibe- and mood- setting is becoming a new tendency in contemporary art.

By creating augmented atmospheric environments, many new exhibitions modulate sensory, spatial, temporal, and material inputs, which create a kind of embodied experience (physical, emotional, and spiritual) that the audience can engage in their own way. Some leading artists include Pierre Huyghe, Anne Imhof, Álvaro Urbano, Mire Lee, Klára Hosnedlová.

In this historical moment of artificial intelligence, artists are rethinking our relationship with art. If pursuing “intellect” is not the way, our living body is the last resort.

Eunice Tsang:

There already has been a renewed appreciation of craftsmanship.

There’s so much AI. We’re in this post-internet age where everything can be done on a laptop, or with a click of a button, where you can’t tell what is even being made by AI or humans anymore.

Whereas previously, if you were someone who made things with hands, you’re seen as a craftsman, not a contemporary artist. Now we’ll return to an appreciation of handicraft. For me, I absolutely enjoy little surprises or mistakes or unexpected things that happen when you make things with your hands. They show the rawness and humanness in our art.

 I also think that there is a growing appreciation for communal art events. At Current Plans at least, we do coffee, communal cooking, and residencies. We host people. They can sleep here.  Just like with handicraft, I personally appreciate the return to this chaos and messiness and rawness of human connection.

What I noticed during Hong Kong’s art month in March was the lack of Europeans and Americans. The visitor crowd’s overwhelmingly from China and probably Southeast Asia. A lot of Asian faces in general. I spoke to my friend Edouard from Kiang Malingue Gallery, and he said the reasons were geopolitics.

Galleries in Hong Kong especially, since it’s still one of the main markets in Asia, are trying to find ways to be less reliant on Western visitors. With the world (and other continents) being extremely volatile, foreign markets could shift at any time. It’s not dependable territory anymore. Whereas, I think Asia is looking to be much more stable.

You’re seeing this shift into artists from our region being represented and being marketed more. At Basel, the focus seemed to be on a lot of China-based artists. Buyers are also seeing the value and taking them more seriously. China’s not as isolated as it used to be; the global audience can relate to it a lot better. And recent shifts like China-maxxing impact the perception of artists in China.

I went to a few parties with a bunch of artists visiting from the Philippines, Malaysia, setting popups and doing satellite exhibitions as well. Even these visiting artists are overwhelmingly more and more Asian. As China’s influence starts increasing, you’re going to see other Asian countries piggybacking on that trend as well, which is kind of cool since I’m from Singapore. So not only will you see a shift in focus on China-based artists, but definitely Southeast Asia will be an important market to look into.

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Imagine this: you are a young Filipino child, traveling to a large Japanese city like Tokyo for the first time in your life. It’s the ‘90s, and people from the Philippines didn’t often travel overseas.

You are inside a large department store in Ginza accompanying your parents, who are holding several bags containing an afternoon’s worth of shopping. You turn and an aroma wafts from a restaurant nearby. You walk towards it. A young girl—probably around your age—is holding a tray with a bowl of ramen. You smell the noodles some more, and she exclaims, “Oishi!”

At first, you have no idea what she means: “Who, me?” you ask.

“No no… please come with me. Let’s eat together,” she replies in straight Japanese. She serves you a chopstick full of noodles and the taste is too good not to exclaim the word: “Oishi!”, which means “delicious” in Japanese.

I’d imagine that’s the narrative-arc that copywriters at Oishi, the brand advertising two flavors of instant noodles, had in mind when developing this 50-second segment:

Oishi is not a Japanese brand. It’s a snack company based in the Philippines with Filipino-Chinese owners. Headquarters are in Metro Manila, while their products—mostly snack versions of Filipino foods—are also distributed throughout China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong.

Oishi’s faux Japanese-ness is a dead giveaway just a few seconds into the ad, which quickly reveals itself as a kitschy, exaggerated pastiche of Japanese culture: The opening sequence begins with a percussion-ized version of the intro to Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting” (a knock off of Chinese music, by the way); later on, a more-Filipino-than-Japanese-looking chef speaks in an exaggerated Japanese accent to introduce the Oishi products being advertised: “It’s the noodles: Kobe beef and chicken flavor!” he says, swapping his Rs for his Ls. It’s not very Japanese at all. But the average Filipino consumer in the 1990s was probably not a great judge for what authentically belonged to the culture.

My parents, both Gen Xers who spent adolescence and young adulthood in the ‘90s, tell me that for the country’s average consumer back then, the idea of Japan was unfamiliar, but aspirational. In Manila, there were sleek Teppanyaki restaurants with dark, opulent interiors, often frequented by the nouveau riche for birthday parties or special events. My maternal grandparents had worked in and frequented Japan, and mom was the envy of other kids in grade school classes for her Sanrio stickers and stationery. As the Philippines’ consumer middle class gradually expanded in the 1990s, a fair share of their leisurely spending went to products that were Japanese.

A similar phenomenon was brewing across Asia, where a growing middle class was stuck pondering what a “modern” lifestyle looked like (and how they could consume it). The “American dream”—the marketed idea of home ownership, college education, and conspicuous middle-class consumption—felt distant, or not directly translatable to Asian cultural contexts. It had been coined in the 1930s, nearly half a century earlier, and, as media sociologist Kōichi Iwabuchi notes, didn’t align much with the “Asian value thesis” of Lee Kuan-Yew of Singapore and Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia. So instead, these classes looked to the lone nation in the region that had already become a developed economy in the decades prior: Japan.

In the 1970s, Japan’s middle class had already formed—a decade before the Asian Miracle completed in the ‘80s, and two decades before Southeast Asian economies grew to maturity in the ‘90s. Japan as Asia’s North Star of economic development provided a unique vector to channel this aspirational middle class lifestyle, and transform it into a marketable, culturally familiar form for Asia’s new middle class.

In Recentering Globalization, Iwabuchi argues that in the 1990s, Japanese media companies exported the Japanese experience of Western culture to Asia, transforming Western lifestyles and middle class values into a format that was familiar to Asian consumers. It coincided with Japanese civilization theories of the decade that framed Japan as “a new guiding principle of global history” particularly for its “capacity for assimilating the best from other cultures and civilizations.” The result: Japan became a country whose lifestyles the region could aspire towards. Purchasing Japanese goods, seeking something akin to the modern Japanese lifestyle, as my dad recalls, “was an aspiration for sophistication.”

It would be later observed that middle-class lifestyles in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines were modeled after “American, Japanese, Chinese, [and/or] Islamic” influences, as Japanese think-tank RIETI notes. But this Japanese influence is particularly outsized: Chinese and Islamic culture have longer-standing histories in the region, while the United States boasts a larger apparatus for global cultural influence.

At the same time, “Language barriers were difficult to cross,” my mom says. Since few people in the Philippines had actually traveled to Japan, “it was aspirational because it wasn’t accessible to everyone.”

That’s one working theory on why brands like Oishi feigned Japanese-ness to the point of absolute parody. Adjacency to Japanese culture placed these products within the conception of the modern Asian lifestyle—one that middle-class Filipino consumers were still in the process of defining.

Oishi is not the only snack brand in the region that feigned some kind of Japanese branding. And it’s far from the most guilty one at that. In 1993, two men from Hong Kong, Lai Chan Yuk Hing and Lai Hin Tai, founded Aji Ichiban (stylized as “優の良品), a Japanese-style snack store chain. But most of its branches looked a lot more like Chinese medicine stores: the beef jerky, dried squid, shrimp crackers, and wasabi peas Aji Ichiban sold were neatly divided into plastic transparent boxes.

The region’s consumer electronics companies were also performing similar branding experiments. AKIRA, a Singaporean brand selling televisions, home appliances and audiovisual equipment, was launched in 1984, around the same time monocultural American blockbusters like Die Hard imagined Japanese tech companies taking over the world. Two decades later, in the Philippines, a lighting company named Akari launched. Both AKIRA and Akari are very Japanese in name alone—both companies’ logos use type faces that could be pulled from a science fiction anime poster; one of them even shares a name with the cult-classic manga, AKIRA.

Today, Asia is abundant in faux Japanese brands that feed the lingering desire for aspirational Japanese consumption. Yoyoso, Usupso, Yubiso are three different retail chains with Japanese monikers, but all operate and sell entirely in China. The largest housewares retail brand in Hong Kong is called “Japan Home Centre,” while Kojie San, a Filipino skincare company, sells Japanese-style skin-lightening serums across Southeast Asia.

But the most successful example of the fake Japanese brand is probably MINISO, the retail giant that sells cosmetics, cute plushies, and toys styled after Kuromi or One Piece. By design, the brand sounds and looks like a variety store alternative to UNIQLO. Both share fully-capitalized names that end with an “O,” and use red square logos with white text. MINISO, however, is headquartered in Guangzhou, founded by Chinese businessman Ye Guofu. Their global store count is nearly 7,000, but not a single one is in Japan.

In 2025, companies probably would not get away with blasting ads filled with clumsy imitations of Japanese culture. Many of Asia’s middle class know Japanese culture well enough already: traveling to Japan annually is already a large part of the lifestyles of consumers in the Asia-Pacific, as data from Expedia and Mastercard reveals.

But in speaking to some friends about this subject, many were surprised to find out that MINISO was a Chinese brand, and not a Japanese one. In 2022, MINISO publicly apologized for pretending to be Japanese, but by then the company was already a resounding success: it had IPO’d on both the New York and Hong Kong stock exchanges, and today, its market cap hovers around US$7.6 billion.

The rest of Asia knows Japan a lot better now than it did in the 90s. But aspirational consumption for all that is Japanese leaves many just as easily fooled.

In 2021, during the early years of the pandemic, social lives primarily took place on the internet. When attention primarily took a digital form, many can remember the ways that video games were one of the few places where people could interact with one another in a shared activity. Think of Fortnite discord calls that bled into morning, group Among Us playthroughs that streamed on Twitch, or a nightly skribbl.io session played with friends over Zoom.

In a landscape like this, several brands sidestepped traditional physical advertising in favor of campaigns that were native to where social life was going: video games.

Some brands leaned into in-game activations, creating character skins to build brand love and brand awareness as more people spent time playing video games. As early as 2021, Balenciaga teamed up with Dimension Studio to create Afterworld: “With Fashion Weeks around the world forced online during the pandemic,” the game’s website noted, “Balenciaga imagined the next generation of virtual catwalk shows.” Created using Unreal Engine, the 3D web-based game that served as a digital showcase for the brand’s fall collection in the year when real-life shows could not.

In the same year, Louis Vuitton released Louis: The Game, a retelling of the brand’s history to celebrate the fashion house’s 200th birthday. Released on the App Store, the game spotlights a small, wooden avatar Vivienne, who needs to collect 200 candles to commemorate the birthday of Louis Vuitton. A glowing review from Highsnobiety says, Louis: The Game is “reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.”

These became known as “advertigames”—where games become advertisements, when global lockdowns forced most of the fashion industry into digital runways and online stores. Four years later, the trend is still running strong.

In November 2025, Gentle Monster released THE ROOM, a survival horror game where players evade a masked killer and uncover clues to unearth new details about the brand’s Fall 2025 collection. The game builds on Gentle Monster’s recent campaign featuring Hunter Schafer, turning a traditional ad into an interactive user experience.

Gentle Monster is joined by several other brands in creating similar activations. Godmode, a beauty brand by Chloë Grace Moretz and Rina Sawayama, uses videogame-style lore for product storytelling and embeds videogame dynamics to each of their product drops. And in anticipation of the 2025 League of Legends World Championship, Riot Games collaborated with Mercedes-Benz to create a bedazzled sculptural rework of the famed Mercedes-Benz CLA model.

The most recent example, perhaps, is Coach’s recent collaboration with The Sims. In January 2026, the New York-based fashion house collaborated with Electronic Arts to create a free nine-item digital collection for The Sims 4 base game. The collection includes Sim-compatiable items from Coach’s ready-to-wear line, offering 65 different variations for full customization. 3D in-game recreations of the brand’s Tabby and Brooklyn bags were also included as decorative objects, allowing players to use them for their Sims’ homes in-game.

But the most interesting part about this shift is the variety of different sub-genres the “advertigame” entails: it appears in MOBAs, in single-player stories, in battle royals, in life simulators and sandboxes.

That may indicate a wider shift in gaming’s role in society. Traditionally, the activity was once reserved for teenage boys. But according to a report by the Entertainment Software Association, the identity of a “gamer” in 2026 is much more heterogeneous—more mature, and much more diverse in gender: the report finds the average gamer is 41, and almost half are female. Brands looking to expand their reach are beginning to notice, viewing the medium as more than just a pastime for adolescent males, but something that a diverse group of people actually spend their downtime on.

The rise of the “advertigame” also comes at a time when social media channels are in slow decline. Global social media use has been declining since 2022, with engagement rates across Facebook, X, and Instagram steadily decreasing. Human content is increasingly being sidelined by AI-generated posts. This is the rise of the “dead internet theory,” which speculates that most of the activity on the internet isn’t generated by humans, but by bots. It’s not seriously grounded in truth, but it does reflect an all-too-common feeling that brands and creators are experiencing: it is increasingly difficult to reach people through traditional social channels alone.

Video games, however, are fully interactive. Attention is easier to sustain than on a playable game than it is on a For You page. Besides, a video game always needs a human player.

In 2026, we probably won’t see every single brand use video games as an advertising medium. But the “advertigame” signals an important shift. That perhaps the future of the campaign is one where consumers play a bigger role. Instead of speaking top-down, brands can generate closer, more interactive relationships with their audiences to create campaigns with impacts that last far longer than a 30-minute pre-YouTube sequence.

In 2025, toy brands like Pop Mart and Jellycat launched into mainstream popularity. But unlike previous toy sellers (think: Toys R Us) these brands’ target markets didn’t consist of children. They consisted of adults.

For Pop Mart’s globally popular Labubu doll, packaging states that the toy is “Not suitable for persons under 15.” This created a new consumer identity that publications like the Business Insider and trend forecasting agencies like WGSN called the “kidult”: a young adult consumer who uses disposable income to purchase items traditionally considered childish. Much of this was the target of plenty of trendslop—some of it accurate, most of it numbingly repeated ad nauseam: “Labubu as a signal of cultural malaise,” “blind box toy as the death of upward mobility and home ownership,” and “kidult consumers are millennials who refuse to age.”

But what might be more interesting about “kidult” discourse is how the mega-trend is shaping other aspects of life. #kidcore is one example of this. It’s an aesthetic that celebrates nostalgia through bright, playful imagery of a childhood in the ‘90s and early 2000s. TV shows like The Powerpuff Girls or videogames like Animal Crossing and Kirby are cited as examples, according to one page on the Aesthetics Wiki.

One domain of #kidcore’s influence is fashion. Think of bright primary colors and a playful mix of textures and patterns. Graphic tees with cartoon characters or tie-dye patterns. Denim or corduroy overalls. Very saturated knitwear. Colorful Converse, Crocs, or light-up shoes. A more-is-more attitude to style.

But this doesn’t reflect the new “kidult”: the young adult with Labubu dolls on their purse or jellycats sitting atop white bedsheets. #kidcore may have its origins in Western media and brands, or in Japanese videogames, but increasingly, China is playing a big role in influencing the aesthetic too.

As some creators on RedNote are showing, the new Labubu-influenced ‘kidult’ is actively reshaping the fashion aesthetic. China is taking #kidcore and making it new.

We’ve curated some examples of adults are dressing in child-like ways—in #kidcore, that is. And we’ve compared the aesthetic’s Western- and Japanese-inspired forms against the new emerging way of dressing in China. Categorized as #kidcore on XiaoHongShu, the Chinese version of the fashion trend uses clashing colors, thrifted whimsy, playful charms—and it’s what Jing Daily describes as “perfect for the playground.”

Early #kidcore vs. the new China kidult. How are they different?

We compared #kidcore mood boards on Cosmos against #kidcore outfits on 小红书 / Rednote.

DIVERGENCES

1. Change in symbol. Hello Kitty, Care Bear, Froot Loops make way for iconography that is brand agnostic. Some old symbols remain, but they’re largely remixed or completely new. In China, old references make way for an anarchy of symbols that still align with a sense of child-like play.

2. Vibe shift. Pastel pink y2k nostalgia core makes way for a more cosmopolitan, more modern style in China.

3. Feminine to masculine. Traditionally “girly” high-in-saturation clothes make way for a more neutral style in China (here, “neutral” means both gender- and color- neutral).

CONTINUITIES

1. For #kidcore, pastel blue is here to stay.

2. Smiley, bright, happy symbols.