Art Writing and Publishing in Southeast Asia: Collectivity and Land Issues
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 a British Academy 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, Brigitta Isabella, Arianna Mercado and Lyno Vuth.
About the participants
Lara Acuin is a writer and cultural worker. She has written for publications, supported exhibitions, worked with institutions and helped artists materialise ideas. She is currently an art consultant and the OIC Chairperson for the Creative Industries Management programme of De La Salle College of Saint Benilde in Manila.
Dini Adanurani is a film researcher, critic and curator from Indonesia. She is fascinated by post/colonial narratives, mediated experiences, and the perpetual overwriting of the past with the present. She was a member of the Kultursinema research group and served as a selector for the ARKIPEL Film Festival 2023. She is currently attending FilmMemory, an Erasmus Mundus MA on European Film Heritage, History and Culture.
Vincent Ardidon is a writer from Manila.
Roma Estrada teaches languages, the humanities and civic consciousness in Manila. She co-edited LILA (Librong LIRA, 2019), an all-women poetry anthology and The Art of Women’s Struggles (PUON Books, 2025), an all-women essay anthology.
Prapan Jangkitchai is a lecturer at Silpakorn University specialising in modern and contemporary art in Thailand and Southeast Asia. He explores art as a site where social and political meanings are negotiated, investigating how artworks and exhibitions collaborate to construct and deconstruct the realities we inhabit.
Nuttamon Pramsumran is a Thai artist and author. She co-founded Circle Theatre Bangkok in 2018 and has collaborated on community projects, including Parallel Normalities (2021–23), a cross-cultural exchange between Thailand and Japan. She was artist-in-residence at the Treasure Hill Artist Village in Taipei in 2025. Currently based in Tokyo, she investigates the city’s covered waterways known as ankyo and their relationship to urban development and migration.
Vân Đỗ is a curator and writer whose practice examines the politics of site and performance as historiography in Southeast Asia. Her curatorial work stages interventions within existing sites or structures, grounded in research-led formal and conceptual inquiry, treating them as unstable grounds where spatial, social and political forces are negotiated and reconfigured. Based between Thailand and Vietnam, she is a curator at deCentral (Bangkok and Chiang Mai) and a member of the curatorial board at Á Space (Hanoi).
Hung Duong writes independently. His criticism of contemporary art is founded on exchanges with artmakers about art’s versatile roles in society. He runs his own website sea-through.net as a reservoir for his sprawling thoughts, while actively contributing to Artforum, frieze, ArtAsiaPacific and other platforms.
Lyna Kourn is a Phnom Penh-based cultural practitioner and podcast host dedicated to the Cambodian art scene. Through her podcast and creative productions, she elevates diverse voices and fosters deep cross-cultural connections. Lyna uses art’s power to inspire empathy, pushing the boundaries of storytelling to bridge communities and celebrate untold narratives.
Meta Moeng is an independent curator working on contemporary art in Cambodia. She is interested in exploring questions of urban form and urban development and observations of cities where development changes the landscape. She lives and works between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap.
Lk Rigor interfaces with art by way of text, research, curation and administration. She engages in projects that allow for conversation, critique and play, with partiality towards those that touch on archival photographs, publishing or knowledge production. She has participated in international programmes by Taiwan Art Space Alliance (2024) and Para Site, Hong Kong (2025).
Akmalia Rizqita, or better known as ‘Chita’, treats her everyday work with the research group Hyphen– in organising, writing, interpreting and interlocuting in the arts as a conscious stance, while working towards better rights and working conditions for herself and her peers. In a different vein, she draws comics under the pen name chitarum, a practice that complements her day to day life as an art worker through personal reflection and visual storytelling.
Ibrahim Soetomo is a curator, writer and freelance researcher based in Jakarta. He earned a Master’s degree from the Bandung Institute of Technology (2023) with a thesis analysing Dan Suwaryono’s formalist art criticism from the 1950s to the 1980s. A regular contributor to Whiteboard Journal and has published works in magazines such as Tempo and Kalam, his current research focuses on the lives of artists and art critics in Indonesia, particularly during the transitional period of the 1950s–1970s.
Ariane Sutthavong is a curator and researcher engaging the uneasy intersection of art and politics. She is part of deCentral’s curatorial team, and presented an archival exploration of Thai writer Suwanni Sukhontha at the Thailand Biennale Phuket (2025). Her practice emerges from sites of friction – between registers, temporalities or social imaginaries – and seeks to hold space for forms of knowledge that do not readily translate.
Beverly Yong has worked in the field of contemporary art in Southeast Asia since the late 1990s, as a writer, curator, gallerist and editor. She is co-founder of RogueArt, a partnership working with publications, exhibitions, collections and projects in Malaysia and the region, based in Kuala Lumpur.