Open Letter from Our Founders

There are artists whose names the world already knows.  Yayoi Kusama.  Ai Weiwei.  Zao Wou-Ki.  Hiroshi Sugimoto.  Do Ho Suh.  Xu Bing.  Cai Guo-Qiang.  Nam June Paik.  Takashi Murakami.  Isamu Noguchi.  Their work has crossed borders, entered museum collections, shaped critical conversation, and enlarged the vocabulary of contemporary art.  For every artist who has found that stage, many thousands more remain scarcely known beyond their immediate circles.

We believe the world has only begun to see what Asian art has to offer.

Asia is not a single aesthetic, a single history, or a single people.  It is China and Japan, Korea and the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia, Myanmar and Singapore, Taiwan and Mongolia, the Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, and the island worlds of Southeast Asia.  It is the ancient and the contemporary.  It is the temple and the gallery, the sword and the scroll, the ceramic and the photograph, the textile and the sculpture, the ink painting and the moving image.  It is also the diaspora: the artist born in Seoul and working in London, the painter from Manila living in Los Angeles, the photographer from Tokyo exhibiting in Paris, the ceramicist from Vietnam whose work has never left the studio, the young artist in Jakarta, Singapore, Taipei, or Hong Kong whose name has not yet reached the international field.

We are looking for the extraordinary.  Not simply the famous, the established, or what the market already understands.  We seek the artist whose work arrests attention, the artist who carries a thousand years of tradition into a new language, the artist who breaks with tradition altogether, and the artist who makes something the world has not yet seen.

We welcome the master beside the emerging voice, the celebrated beside the overlooked, the traditional beside the experimental: the painter beside the sculptor, the photographer beside the ceramicist, the contemporary artist beside the artisan whose family has practiced an art for generations.  We want the old and the new to speak to one another.

We hope to discover the artists who may one day stand among them.  Great art does not always arrive under a famous name.  Sometimes it arrives quietly: in a village, a workshop, a university studio, the back room of a gallery, the hands of a young artist who has never been exhibited, the work of an immigrant negotiating two cultures, or the inherited craft of a family that has never considered itself part of the international art world.

These are the diamonds we wish to find: rare work, carefully recognized.

Our purpose is plain.  We search for extraordinary Asian artists and bring their work into conversation with a global audience.

There should be a place where the many artistic traditions of Asia can meet without being reduced to a single definition.  A place where Chinese ink can stand beside Filipino contemporary painting, where Japanese ceramics can stand beside Korean abstraction, where Indonesian textiles can meet Vietnamese lacquer, where a centuries-old sword may be considered not only as a weapon but as an object of craftsmanship, history, and cultural memory, and where the work of the Asian diaspora can stand alongside work made within Asia itself.

We are not looking for one definition of Asian art.  We are looking for its many definitions.

The story of Asia is too large for one museum, one country, one generation, or one aesthetic.  The greatest artists of the next century may already be among us.  They simply have not yet been found.

This is an invitation.  To the artist who has been waiting for an opportunity.  To the collector who has discovered something extraordinary and believes others should see it.  To the gallery that represents an artist the wider world has overlooked.  To the curator who knows where the next significant voice is emerging.  To the scholar who has spent years studying a tradition that deserves greater recognition.  To the family preserving an important work.  To the young artist working late in a studio somewhere in the world.

We want to see what you have found.  Send us your paintings, sculptures, ceramics, photography, textiles, calligraphy, prints, lacquer, objects of craft, traditional arts, contemporary experiments, installations, digital work, and ideas.  Bring us the work that represents where you come from, where you are going, or something that belongs nowhere except to you.

We will search broadly.  We will look carefully.  We will listen.  We will curate in the belief that significant art deserves to be seen, regardless of where its maker was born, where the maker lives, or how many people have heard the maker's name.

The next chapter of Asian art is being written now.

Help us find it.  Help us find the artists, the stories, and the traditions that deserve to endure, and the new voices that deserve to be heard, from every generation, every tradition, and every corner of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and their diasporas.

We are looking with care, and with the patience this work requires.  If you have something you have loved in private, or something you have been waiting to place in better hands, we would be honored to see it.  Bring it to us.  Tell us who made it, where it has been, and why it matters to you.  We ask where every work has been, and we do not accept objects that left their country of origin unlawfully.  We will meet that trust with attention.

We invite you to take part in what we discover together.

With warmth and respect,

Susan and Gary