(Southeast) Asia’s art horizon

When Amalia Wirjono picked up the phone, she was running on the kind of compressed tempo that the global art calendar can produce. She had just returned from Doha, where Art Basel Qatar was held, and she had half an hour to speak to me. “Since I’ve been back, it’s been like, boom, boom, boom,” she said, laughing.

That pace is part of her job description. Wirjono sits at a junction where museum-building meets market choreography: she is Head of Development at Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art in Nusantara (Museum MACAN) in Jakarta, and she serves within Art Basel’s VIP Representative network for Southeast Asia, connecting collectors, galleries, and institutions across the region.

With Art Basel Hong Kong approaching at the end of March (public days run March 27–29, 2026, with preview days on March 25–26), SILK is paying close attention to the conversations that gather around the fair’s periphery: what collectors are circling, how institutions are positioning themselves, where advisors are placing their attention, and how digital art starts to behave once it gets more and more questions of acquisition, display, conservation, documentation, and long-term care.

Wirjono’s perspective is useful because it is operational. She speaks in the language of infrastructure – like registrars, conservation standards, and public programs – while also keeping one eye on the collector psychology that powers the ecosystem. Digital art, in her view, is rarely a single category. It sits inside a broader story about how Southeast Asia has been building the conditions for contemporary art to circulate with steadier confidence, broader public access, longer continuity, and clearer cross-border movement.

Southeast Asia

Wirjono heard the familiar storyline in my questions – focused on Asia as “rising” – and narrowed it for me: “Actually, you mentioned Asia, but I would specifically say Southeast Asia,” she told me. The distinction matters to her because the region is often treated as an afterthought inside a larger Asia-Pacific frame. “We’re further down, ‘just’ a group of islands, and all different countries,” she says. “But what you can feel in Southeast Asia now, is the density of activity across all these multiple nodes at once: new institutions, steadier international attention, a denser events calendar, and more movement between the region’s cities.”

During our conversation it has become clear to me that this change is both structural and symbolic. Wirjono pointed first to Singapore’s pioneering role as a regional anchor – an ecosystem with a longer runway of institutional investment and technical capacity, including the less glamorous parts of museum life. She talked about conservation facilities as a kind of proof of seriousness: the ability to study and preserve materials across media, from textiles to works on paper, from photography to film. That capacity, she implied, changes how confidently a region can borrow, condition-check, conserve, and host traveling exhibitions.

And then there’s Indonesia’s own shift, which she said is visible through Museum MACAN. Founded as a modern and contemporary art museum in Jakarta with an emphasis on public programs and education, it is an institution that is able to meet international lending standards and produce major exhibitions.

From here, the map keeps filling in. Bangkok, she noted, is drawing attention through new private initiatives and formats. Dib Bangkok for example, a major new contemporary art venue, has positioned itself as a late-2025 opening that aims to function as a new regional landmark. Besides that, the Thailand Biennale’s Phuket edition, running through April 2026, expands the sense that contemporary art can act as a cultural itinerary – an engine for public encounter, education, tourism, and civic imagination.

The cumulative effect: it seems like Southeast Asia is already operating in the present tense and not ‘rising’ like I suggested first.

Museum MACAN

Since Wirjono is closely involved in the development of Museum MACAN, I asked her more about this place specifically and what the operating system signals with regards to the current state of affairs for contemporary art in Southeast Asia.

To Wirjono’s account, Museum MACAN is central to Indonesia's changing position. She described the museum as privately founded and deliberately public-facing: “If you walk into this museum, there is no collection on constant display”, she said, stressing that the institution’s identity is grounded in programming – education, exhibition-making, public engagement, and research-led interpretation.

That approach shows up clearly in the museum’s current major exhibition, Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey (on view from November 29, 2025 to April 12, 2026). The project sits within an Asia-Pacific tour that began at Singapore Art Museum, then moved through Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Taipei Fine Arts Museum before arriving in Jakarta. Museum MACAN describes it as the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Southeast Asia, spanning installation, painting, and sculpture, and including selected works from the museum’s own collection.

When asked, Wirjono is careful about claims of radical difference between Southeast Asia and older Western art centers. Her emphasis sits elsewhere: on professionalization, on time, on roles that have to exist for an art ecosystem to function in the regions she operates. “When Museum MACAN opened”, she said, “a job like registrar didn’t exist here until we built a museum.” That single detail carries a lot of weight, in my opinion. It points to how contemporary art infrastructure is built through the whole architecture around it. In the case of a registrar, it’s just one aspect that is needed for the environment to become durable: the knowledge of handling, condition reporting, shipping protocols, and the long-term stewardship that makes international loans possible.

In total, the sum of all its parts will be important. Wirjono framed this as a practical form of catching up: absorbing established exhibition standards, applying them locally, and then using that competence to shift what becomes possible. Traveling exhibitions can now land in Jakarta with fewer caveats, and they can also move through Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand in sequence. This way, a region becomes legible to lenders and partners because it can care for work responsibly.

→ Digital art enters this picture as a further ‘stress test’, by raising even sharper questions around maintenance, documentation, hardware and software dependencies, and the future readability of an artwork’s operating conditions.

Digital art

Wirjono’s collector-facing observations on this ‘new’ entry point, are as follows: “new media and digital work often function as an entry level category,” she said, “accessible in price, legible to younger collectors (and new institutions), culturally coherent in daily life, and easy to enter without gatekeeping.” However, she also implied that the price point can be a trap, because it can have a shallow relationship to the work’s long-term life as an effect.

In that regard, her main reservation with digital art isn’t about something subjective as aesthetics, but fully on the operational side: “digital work that requires a certain mechanism, also requires collectors (whether private or institutional) to think about longevity.” She added: “In ten years, what will be required for the work to run, be re-installed, be documented accurately, and remain faithful in display? Those are the questions that need to be asked and answered within the space of new media art.”

During our conversation, she immediately tied this to a broader truth: time breaks every medium in its own way. “That’s not just about new media,” she said. “Hardware becomes obsolete, formats vanish, video art ages through playback technology, and older installations rely on machines that no longer circulate.” She offered a telling art-historical bridge to Dan Flavin, whose fluorescent light works remain relevant and collectable, while conservation teams still face the real problem of sourcing components and maintaining standards of presentation as products disappear.

Digital art, in other words, amplifies an old museum question: an artwork’s meaning is partly housed in its dependencies. That doesn’t seem to put people in Southeast Asia off though. Wirjono has seen cases where private collectors create dedicated spaces, that edge toward institutional form, for their art collection. “That arc matters for Southeast Asia because private museums and semi-public collector spaces have played an outsized role in shaping cultural visibility across the region,” Wirjono said to me. “Digital art fits neatly into that pattern: it can be shown as a technological statement, a lifestyle signal, or an educational provocation, depending on how a collector frames access.”

The Hong Kong effect

Wirjono’s predictions for Art Basel Hong Kong lean less on genre forecasting and more on regional temperament. She described Asia as a place with a strong appetite for novelty: “We are always looking into something new. Just to give you an example: everyone is conscious of the latest gadgets; I’ve never seen someone with an old phone,” she laughs.

The line is funny and very exemplary at the same time. In a wider scope, it suggests an art collector base that is shaped by rapid cycles of adoption and replacement, with social media accelerating visual education and taste formation. In Wirjono’s view, that environment creates conditions where digital art can grow quickly, partly because it aligns with everyday behavior: using screens, getting updates, having online visibility, getting quick reactions and combining different softwares, for example.

She also tied this to collector demographics. In many parts of Asia, she said, there are more younger collectors relative to older Western collecting cultures. That youth factor changes risk tolerance and changes the sense of what counts as plausible. Here, new media becomes a field where emerging collectors can build conviction without immediately competing in the most overheated segments of the market.

At the same time, she returned to her earlier caution: novelty becomes thin when it slides into gimmick or isn't questioned properly. She spoke about artists using AI with uneven seriousness – some with deep research into cultural history and material outcome, others with a surface attachment to the tool. The future, in her opinion, belongs to practices that treat technology as method and responsibility: something to study, test, and carry forward thoughtfully.

Noteworthy I’d say that Wirjono’s language was direct during our whole conversation. Writing this article now, I feel this matches her position: she is building the conditions that allow work to last.

A new region

Southeast Asia’s art world is definitely there. It might now be easy to put into an easy, single storyline, but Wirjono has made me excited. The region might still be institutionally uneven, but it is rapidly networked. Overall, it carries distinct national contexts that do not collapse neatly into one regional identity, and that is actually a good thing I’d say. When I asked her about the future, Wirjono kept circling back to certain grounding points that she views are most important: conservation, stewardship, public access, professional roles, and the practical question of how art becomes sustainable as a lived cultural system – whatever the medium is.

Hong Kong, for all its market intensity, will become a place where these questions sharpen. Because fairs concentrate attention, revealing what a region has built thus far and what’s still missing.

As SILK heads into Art Basel Hong Kong, Wirjono’s view offers us a useful orientation: digital art in Southeast Asia gains traction through curiosity and accessibility, and can then mature through institutions that care for it and artists who can ‘carry’ their used technological tools with discipline.

The “boom, boom, boom” pace is as real as you can imagine, but underneath that is the higher and long-term goal of becoming a steady, fruitful ecosystem.