Neo
prefix. new, recent, modified or revived
A platform that foregrounds new galleries and up-and-coming talent
Returning to Art Central for its third year, Neo creates an entry point for galleries to feature cutting-edge or undiscovered artists in their first and second years of participation. Ten galleries will be hosted under the direction of curator Enoch Cheng for a more boundary-pushing edition. Neo represents Art Central’s commitment as a leading incubator for artists and galleries in Asia’s most prominent contemporary art market.
Areté Space
Established in 2023
Beijing
Lin Ge draws from Dunhuang murals, traditional embroidery, and indigenous cultural heritage, integrating these sources with Western modernist aesthetics to construct elaborate pictorial fields where historical memory, literary narratives, and everyday experience converge. Li You’s ‘Body and Fruit’ series centres on backlit fruits and bodily forms as quiet vessels of emotion, using subtle variations of light, repetition, and focused observation to shape a calm, introspective visual space. In dialogue, the artists’ practices illuminate how narrative inheritance and sensory perception operate as parallel modes of form‑making within contemporary painting.
Astra Art
Established in 2022
Shanghai
Astra Art presents four artists who challenge the notion of a singular static identity, asserting instead the self as an assemblage of lifeforms, cultural codes, and historical echoes. Jansword Zhu unveils the self’s polyphonic nature at a genetic level, transfiguring protein structures into astral bodies shaped by biological and cultural data. Eva Chen shapes softened metal and woven textile into light‑responsive structures, where fragile and permeable materialities articulate the self as an assemblage in continual reformation. Marlene Steyn constructs interconnected worlds of multiplying eyes, faces, and neural-like strands of hair through paintings and ceramics, connecting individual subjectivities to broader natural cycles. Guo Jing’s hyperrealist paintings lift everyday scenes of the self from their mundane contexts, reconfiguring them into metaphorical narratives that oscillate between charged tension and wry absurdity.
BOUNDED SPACE
Established in 2014
Beijing
BOUNDED SPACE presents three artists whose practice probes the thresholds between constructed systems and the organic behaviour they set into motion. Maxim Zhestkov models energetic relations through algorithmic form, creating kinetic sculptural systems that register and respond to bodily movement. Jin Ri Long navigates a tension between volatility and restraint, using blurring and reduction techniques to paint visual fields that oscillate between ambiguity and order. Andy Harper transforms procedural painting into a proliferating pictorial language, where grafted and hybridised marks coalesce into landscapes that feel at once futuristic and uncannily familiar.
Kimreeaa Gallery
Established in 2008
Seoul
Three artists explore materiality, depth, and perception through a rigorous inquiry into how physical and visual structures shape the way we experience images in space. Casper Kang engages traditional hanji (Korean mulberry paper), dismantling and reconstituting the medium into abstract configurations that open up new material identities attuned to a contemporary sensibility. Hong Mihee’s semi-sculptural low-relief paintings, built through the accumulated layers of paperboard, create organic topographies that oscillate between image and object, their perceptual shifts activated by the viewer’s movement. Hwang Do You draws together the immediacy of Eastern brushwork and the compositional clarity of Western abstraction. By minimising narrative and emotional inflection, Hwang isolates the chromatic and tactile force of each brushstroke, forming unembellished abstract worlds charged with concentrated, elemental intensity.
Meno Parkas Gallery
Established in 1997
Kaunas
Three artists approach time not as intervals to be measured but as a rhythm to be lived, where small routines become acts of remembering that hold duration and carry it forward. Felicija Dudoit paints the engineered calm of recreational spaces such as lifeguard towers, parasols, and fountains, creating sun‑bleached images that feel subtly detached from ordinary time through their faded palette and staged stillness. Gintautas Trimakas registers duration through analogue processes such as the camera obscura; his ‘Exit’ series traces a sequence of wooden stairways over coastal dunes. Each print records a single passage, and together the images form a quiet chronometer of walking to the sea and back. Marta Frėjutė’s glass works draw on the Lithuanian childhood tradition of sekretai—secret assemblages of small treasures arranged beneath a pane of glass set into the earth. By gathering sand and assorted fragments beneath translucent surfaces, Frėjutė stages micro‑archaeologies that probe curiosity, memory, and the promise of future rediscovery.
MJK Gallery
Established in 2022
Tokyo
MJK Gallery presents a dual-artist presentation grounded in the idea of art as a self-contained environment unfolding across time, space, and sensory perception. New media artist suzueri creates immersive installations. Her research‑based practice integrates layered historical narratives with self‑built instruments and sonic devices, transforming functional telecommunication technologies into poetic systems that mediate memory, perception, and connection. Nana Kuromiya’s paintings form a counterpoint grounded in organic materiality and slow accumulation. Working with oil paint modified by beeswax, pressed flowers, and other organic matter, her practice draws on mythology and literature to produce sculptural, fossil‑like surfaces that trace cycles of preservation, erosion, and renewal.
NoSugar Gallery
Established in 2021
Wuhan
Ming Ke’s practice examines the layered significations of the term “pine” within the Chinese cultural imagination—from the emblematic pine tree, long associated with endurance and moral uprightness, to homophonous terms embedded in everyday expressions that describe easing up or letting go. Working across oil painting, wood carving, interactive installation, and mixed media, Ke gives spatial and formal shape to these polysemic interpretations, tracing not only their natural imagery but also a vocabulary of inner sensibilities—those subtle modulations of tension and release that shape our lived experience.
The Gallery by SOIL
Established in 2012
Hong Kong
Kohei Ukai’s practice foregrounds the primitive vitality of his materials, calibrated through restraint and attentiveness. Carved from wood and patiently coated with layers of urushi lacquer (Japanese natural lacquer), Ukai’s works negotiate a balance between the material’s inherent agency and the artist’s shaping intent through a slow, accumulative process in which each layer subtly registers and responds to the form beneath it. The resulting creations, with their tactility and luminous finish, articulate a sustained commitment to nature and craft as a living practice—transforming raw matter into meditative sculptural presences.
V&E Art
Established in 2018
Taipei, Paris
V&E ART presents a dialogue grounded in the colour blue between two French artists, tracing how a singular chromatic field unfolds into contrasting material worlds—one shaped by light, the other by gesture. Thomas Devaux’s sculptural photographic works are precise, self‑reflexive, and meticulously fractured, as he disassembles and recomposes consumer‑culture imagery to probe its seductive logics. His reflective dichroic glass surfaces, with their dual luminous materiality, implicate the viewer’s own image into the work, laying bare the psychological circuitry that structures contemporary desire. Nicolas Lefeuvre’s ink‑based paintings form a counterpoint informed by the discipline of Asian ink traditions and the structural sensibilities of his architectural background. Working with layers of sumi ink, gold pigments, and calligraphic interventions, Lefeuvre composes atmospheric fields that represent the density of time—memories gathered, sedimented, and held in suspension.
Wolf & Nomad
Established in 2018
Miami
Wolf & Nomad brings together four Latin American artists whose practices draw on ancestral craft traditions, reimagining them through contemporary approaches. Alejandra Aristizabal presents large-scale, fibre-based sculptures rooted in traditional making processes, while Carla Freschi’s hand-stitched embroidery reworks historical textile techniques with modern sensibility. Christian Abusaid’s works reference ancient symbols associated with balance, well-being, and prosperity, translating them into a refined conceptual language through innovative material use. Vanessa Valerio’s tapestry works expand the boundaries of this traditional medium into unexpected forms. Across varied materials and methods, the artists share a commitment to inherited skill sets and collective memory, offering a reflection on cultural continuity within contemporary Latin American art.
