Asia Now, Paris Internationale and Post-Fair Open the City’s Art Week on a Confident Note
Observer ·
Paris Art Week opened with momentum as galleries proceeded with scheduled events despite unrest in the streets. On Monday, several satellite fairs offered a first look at how collectors are spending.
Paris Art Week starts earlier every year, as collectors and art professionals now descend on the French capital straight from London. Art Basel has added an extra day to its VIP program with the more intimate Avant-Première ahead of Wednesday’s opening. Through a weekend of protests and upheaval, galleries across Paris held openings as planned. And yesterday (Oct. 19), four satellite art fairs opened at once: the ambitious Paris Internationale; Asia Now, focused on contemporary art from across Asia; the new-media-oriented OFFSCREEN ; and Chris Sharp ’s Post-Fair. Observer hit three in a full-day marathon, to capture the highlights and identify the artists gaining market traction.
Since its founding in 2015 as one of the first independent, gallery-led alternatives to the conventional art-fair model, Paris Internationale has become a leading platform for experimental contemporary art and emerging galleries. This year, the fair found a fitting home: a disused industrial building with an extensive underground parking garage near hip Canal Saint-Martin. Days earlier, the neighborhood was among those that saw unruly and even violent demonstrations; traces of the turmoil remained visible on opening day, including burned-out cars on streets not far from the entrance.
Yet Paris Internationale still manages to create an immersive experience that begins before visitors enter the fair, with an exhibition in the dimly lit garage that invites a suspension of disbelief and a temporary detachment from the events unfolding outside. “In the Bellies of the Rocks” is an exhibition by Saudi artist Ayman Zedani , presented by Arts AlUla and the AlUla Contemporary Art Museum in collaboration with AFALULA as part of the AlUla Cultural Season in Paris. Developed through several years of research across AlUla and northwestern Arabia, it unfolds as a journey through the region’s fragmented histories, archaeological remains and natural landscapes, exploring the intersections of human civilization, mythology and nature’s deep time. The exhibition design evokes an archaeological excavation, presenting objects and sculptural fragments as speculative finds, while atmospheric videos carry this portrait of the Arabian Peninsula throughout the space. The journey culminates in the unsettling sight of a black eagle lying motionless on a mound of sand.
Titled The Death of Dushara (2026), the sculpture draws on Zedani’s research in Tabuk. The black eagle ( Aquila verreauxii ), a bird native to the Ash-Sharat mountains and historically linked to Nabataean symbolism, ties the region’s ecological vulnerability to its cultural heritage, standing as an emblem of both environmental fragility and collective memory. Throughout the exhibition, natural history becomes inseparable from human history, while the line between archaeological evidence and speculative fiction remains deliberately blurred.
Inside the fair, the unfinished walls and raw surfaces familiar from previous editions return across three floors of presentations mounted by 56 galleries and five nonprofit spaces from 19 countries, including 15 first-time participants. Munich’s Deborah Schamoni sets the tone with new drawings and fragmentary body casts by Rebecca Ackroyd in conversation with Nicole Wermers ’ uncanny sculpture of a cat’s tail coiled like a garden hose and photographs by Jesse Glazzard , establishing a playful yet disquieting atmosphere. In an adjacent room, Italian gallery Vistamare anchors its booth with a large-scale installation by Claudia Comte , in which a group of her signature wooden tree sculptures sprouts and blossoms from a massive trunk left in its raw state. The installation is offered in its entirety for €200,000, or as individual works priced between €28,000 and €36,000. Gallery director Agnese Cutoli told Observer that after seeing the work in the artist’s studio, the gallery was determined to bring it to the fair, and Paris Internationale’s experimental character made it the ideal setting for such a bold presentation.
Paris Internationale’s roster is predominantly European, as it has been since its inception, though this edition has a new curated section spotlighting South Korea’s vibrant emerging scene. Titled “Second Nature” and curated by Oriane Durand and Jiwon Yu , NEXT KOREA: GALLERIES brings together seven young Korean art spaces— Apoproject , Caption, Ingahee , Iah, RANEE SEOUL, Sangheeut and Wwnn—whose artists explore how we make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world, navigating the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the rational and the mystical, the material and the symbolic. Through speculative relics, transformed objects and hybrid forms, the presentations show how imagination, ritual and material culture still offer ways to cope with reality and envision alternatives in times of disruption.
Among the highlights are carved and painted wooden sculptures by Korean duo BBK ( Jongwan Jang and Junho Jang ), who conjure symbolic worlds within the material itself. Working together since 2019, the duo explores collective beliefs through utopian imagination, “invented traditions” and the projection of human desires onto nature. A surrealist-inflected sculpture of an elongated arm holding a fungus sold in the opening hours; prices range from €4,000 to €7,500. Sangheeut pairs their works with Jisoo Lee ’s symbolically layered paintings, whose dense abstract surfaces capture the anxiety and vulnerability that so often accompany contemporary life.
Nearby, RANEE SEOUL presents lenticular works by Dew Kim inspired by Gothic church architecture, which reconfigure religious symbolism through a queer lens to reveal the sublimated eroticism within (€4,400-8,000). Charged with a more unsettling psychological tension are Kun Kung ’s delicate pastels, built through a process of addition and erasure that becomes an act of catharsis and healing (€2,900). They hang alongside a haunting, spirit-like sculpture in fabric and resin (€7,500), which was snapped up by an American collector shortly after the doors opened. Shin On Nam ’s eerie installations, meanwhile, expose the social conventions that shape and constrain how we live.
Upstairs are tangible examples of the fair’s growing openness to projects spanning creative industries. Visitors are greeted by a preview of the latest collaboration between Swiss sportswear brand On and Sky High Farm Goods, the fashion and lifestyle label that supports Sky High Farm, the Hudson Valley nonprofit founded by artist Dan Colen .
Tokyo’s Tomio Koyama Gallery has staged an intergenerational dialogue among works by Makiko Kudo ; Keiji Ito , a 91-year-old ceramicist and painter; and Kishio Suga , a key figure of Japan’s Mono-ha movement. Ito’s work has drawn considerable international interest, and the gallery sold out its presentation at the fair a few years ago. His austere, archaic sculptures have a timeless, almost archetypal quality, their totemic presence raising fundamental questions about existence, embodiment, memory and spirituality. By the opening, the gallery had sold ceramics priced around €8,000 and paintings priced at €9,500, confirming sustained demand for his practice.
On the same floor, one of the strongest presentations comes from Paris gallery Ciaccia Levi , which is showing works by Guadeloupe-born, Paris-based Kenny Dunkan . Drawing on Caribbean mythology, carnival traditions and magico-religious practices, Dunkan translates these references into a distinctly contemporary, urban aesthetic that questions the legacy of French colonialism and its lasting impact on cultural identity and the environment. His installations set the cold materiality of industrial elements against organic materials from the Caribbean ecosystem, exposing the tensions between nature and the artificial world steadily encroaching on it, and between cultural memory and colonial systems of representation. With works priced below €20,000, the presentation makes a compelling case for an artist whose practice deserves greater institutional attention.
One of Paris Internationale’s greatest strengths is the way its unconventional venue accommodates complex installations that would be hard to stage in a traditional booth. Among them is IV Chan ’s The Good, the Bed and the Snuggly (2023), presented by Hong Kong’s Square Street Gallery . In a room on the second floor, the artist has created a hallucinatory environment centered on a broken wooden crib, from which two intertwined forms, one purple and one green, spill into the surrounding space. Peering through a curtain, visitors become voyeurs in an unsettling encounter between childhood innocence and adult sexuality. Informed by Georges Bataille ’s writings on eroticism and transgression, the installation explores repressed fantasies, awakening erotic impulses and the violent loss of self associated with desire.
Nearby, Athens- and Paris-based artist Agata Ingarden follows a successful presentation at Frieze with new works brought by Cologne’s Berthold Pott, extending her investigation into the porous relationship among bodies, architecture and technology. Her Atlas sculptures (2025) combine salvaged elevator components, steel, instrument strings and bronze casts of the seven cervical vertebrae, turning architectural infrastructure into a mechanical spine and sounding body. Through these hybrid structures, Ingarden explores the notion of “vibrating matter,” suggesting that a constant flow of impulses runs through bodies, objects and environments. The built environment becomes something close to a living organism, and technology an extension of our anatomy and of our need to situate ourselves in the world.
At a moment when established systems and certainties are increasingly called into question, it is no surprise that several works address the unstable relationship between the natural world and human interventions. Mexico City’s General Expenses , for example, is presenting eerie black bird-feeder structures by British artist Tom Bull . Incorporating wood tar, black feathers and other dark, charred-looking materials, the works evoke a landscape scarred by destruction and industrial activity. A painting reimagining the Great Fire of London and a black stove extend these references to Britain’s industrial past, pointing to the troubled bond between human progress and ecological loss.
Few young Greek galleries have established a sustained presence on the international fair circuit, but Athens-based Callirrhoë has been steadily expanding its reach. Its solo booth of works by Vasilis Papageorgiou features bronze sculptures that extend his ongoing investigation into overtourism and the commodification of the Cycladic landscape. A new series, Scarps , first shown in his solo exhibition at the gallery this summer, is cast from molds taken directly from sedimentary rocks on Koufonisia, where rampant real estate development has left bricks, concrete and construction debris embedded in ancient limestone, creating hybrid geologies. The artist describes these casts as “screenshots of time,” which fix ongoing ecological disruption in bronze and preserve scars left by unchecked development.
Nearby, Zurich gallery Gregor Staiger has staged a solo presentation of works by Nora Turato , whose latest pieces push her investigation of language toward greater abstraction. Known for channeling the accelerated rhythms of contemporary communication into performances, installations and text-based works, Turato here lets words slip their immediate semantic function to become visual forms in which typography, rhythm and fragmentation take precedence. Language itself emerges as an unstable symbolic material, suspended between communication and its breakdown.
Mexico City’s Pequod has brought an intriguing encounter between technology and the supernatural with Andrew Roberts ’ cyborg-like skeletons inhabited by demonic forms. Incorporating elements of role-play, gaming and worldbuilding, the artist draws on the aesthetics of horror to explore haunted histories, colonial legacies and geopolitical tensions between Mexico and the United States. These skeletal hybrids conjure a dark imaginary in which technological transformation gives new physical form to mythological structures and archetypes, offering ways to confront the complexities of contemporary life. Roberts has shown at institutions including the Whitney Museum, the São Paulo Biennial and Museo Jumex.
Meanwhile, Shanghai’s Linseed is presenting paintings by Shannon Delaney Ryan , whose brooding compositions evoke psychological spaces that sit between recognition and uncertainty. Priced between €2,000 and €5,000, her works offer an accessible entry point into a promising emerging practice. Alongside them are delicate silk constructions by Chinese artist Antone Liu and glass sculptures by Venezuelan artist Angvir Padilla , a mix that demonstrates the international reach of the gallery’s program.
While Paris Internationale is often associated with the emerging end of the market, it also makes room for the rediscovery of long-overlooked and outsider figures. One of this year’s true gems is the selection of mystical drawings by Eleni Pitari Pangalou, presented by Greek gallery The Breeder. Born in Istanbul in 1905, Pangalou moved to Greece with her parents as a child and developed a singular language that anticipated futuristic dystopias. Much like Fritz Lang ’s Metropolis , her imagined cityscapes expose the psychological anxieties brought on by modernization and urban growth. Yet hovering above these menacing metropolises are fairy-like figures who introduce an element of fantasy and magic, holding out the possibility of redemption and renewal. Her work has only recently resurfaced, following an exhibition in Athens. Drawings here are priced between €12,000 and €15,000, and one of the three on view found a buyer in the fair’s first hours.
Asia Now, which is dedicated to artists from across Asia and its diasporas, opened its 12th edition with some 60 galleries, institutions and private foundations presenting work by more than 200 artists. While many participants come from the region, others are international galleries that have built significant parts of their programs around Asian artists. As the organizers put it, Asia here is not merely a geography but a methodology and a movement, reflecting how cultural influences and artistic practices circulate well beyond national borders. This year’s curatorial theme, “Sentimental Value,” shifts the focus toward relationships among people, materials, memory and cultural inheritance, exploring how objects acquire meaning that exceeds their market worth.
In the central tent, Beijing- and Paris-based HdM Gallery is showing sculptural works by Qi Zhuo , who modifies forms reminiscent of Chinese antiquities with colorful, almost bubblegum-like glass interventions. The resulting hybrids set historical fragments against contemporary materials, suggesting that repairing the past means acknowledging its fractures rather than attempting to erase them. Each is priced around €16,000—one sold during the preview—and they are being shown with abstract paintings by young, Venice-based Chinese artist Fang Yirui , who draws on the dramatic compositions and painterly intensity of the Baroque to develop a densely tactile, almost ecstatic abstraction. Priced between €8,000 and €18,000, the paintings mark the gallery’s first market test of the artist.
The growing visibility of Indian contemporary art is reflected in the presence of Mumbai’s Art and Charlie , which has brought work by Attiya Usman and Saviya Lopes . Singapore’s LOY Contemporary Art Gallery , meanwhile, is showing the surreal, mushroom-populated worlds of Chinese artist Liu Bin , whose anthropomorphic forms turn familiar natural imagery into strange, unnerving landscapes. Following the artist’s successful presentation at Art House Tai Hang in Hong Kong last year, his paintings, priced at €13,000-24,000, drew early buyers; one had sold by midday. Alongside are works by Qian Lihuai , who brings traditional Chinese bamboo-weaving techniques into a contemporary sculptural language.
After the annual courtyard brunch—which this year served HANDO’s hand rolls and sweets instead of the usual dumplings—visitors climbing the Monnaie de Paris’s elegant staircase encountered works and installations from the second edition of “The Third Space,” curated by Valentina Rosas Saad . Inspired by Homi Bhabha’s concept of cultural hybridity, the initiative expands the fair beyond conventional booths, turning the historic building into a platform for installations, moving images and site-specific interventions that explore where different identities, geographies and artistic traditions intersect and transform one another.
At the entrance, Mor Charpentier has Pattern Recognition by Indian artist Reena Kallat , a timely reflection on the persistent inequalities of global mobility. Borrowing the format of eye charts, six pyramidal structures made from maps and electric wires visualize Henley Passport Index rankings from 2006 to 2026, positioning countries according to the freedom of movement their passports afford. In an increasingly interconnected world, the work exposes how profoundly unequal the right to cross borders remains.
Also part of “The Third Space” is “Surface Tensions (À fleur de peau),” a two-artist presentation by Lux Feminae of Shanghai-born painter Katinka Huang and Japanese ceramicist Kodai Ujiie , whose works challenge the conventions of their respective mediums while weaving autobiographical narratives into material experimentation. For Huang, the presentation is a prelude to her solo exhibition at Salon 94 opening in November. Moving between figuration and psychological abstraction, her paintings imagine the self as a shifting cast of characters in constant negotiation. Informed by her upbringing in China and subsequent moves to the U.K. and the U.S., Huang pictures identity as adaptable, endlessly reshaped by the contexts we inhabit and by how we perceive ourselves.
Nearby, Paris’s Galerie Lefevre & Fils is showing a playful series of figurative ceramics by Korean-Peruvian-American artist Isolina Minjeong . Inspired by the mystical guardians and ritual effigies of ancient Inca and Korean tombs, her strange creatures reimagine ancestral mythologies with an almost pop sensibility, balancing the protective power of their sources with a more vulnerable, psychological presence.
Among the established international galleries is Esther Schipper , which is introducing a new collaboration with Taiwanese artist Tseng Chien-Ying alongside works by Indian artist Prabhavathi Meppayil . Priced between €15,000 and €25,000, Tseng’s densely symbolic works on paper add metallic leaf to his precise ink drawings for the first time, lending a new ritual and spiritual dimension to his deity-like figures. Steeped in Buddhist iconography and historical visual languages, they channel contemporary anxieties through near-sacred imagery. Meppayil’s restrained sculptures offer a counterpoint, recasting techniques inherited from her family’s goldsmithing tradition in a minimalist idiom.
Particularly poetic is “You Are Here,” a presentation of works by Filipino artist Pam Yan Santos staged by Manila’s The Drawing Room. Reflecting on her experience as a mother, a woman and an individual in an increasingly uncertain world, Santos turns familiar symbols into a meditation on the fragility of existence and our need for collective belonging. More than 1,000 eggs, each marked with a date of birth, cluster in a precarious globe, suggesting the interdependence of lives that may never directly intersect. Grass, which pushes through even cracks in concrete, becomes a metaphor for the common ground we share, while printed texts question our responsibilities toward one another and the environment. The installation invites viewers to locate themselves within this delicate web of relationships, a reminder that even in a world defined by anxiety and isolation, existence is never entirely individual.
Elsewhere, Japanese artist Eri Maeda ’s mischievous ceramic monsters turn everyday objects, from toasters to dessert stands and cakes, into absurd, creaturely hybrids. Presented by Artenae , these glossy, vividly colored sculptures seduce at first glance, only to reveal disquieting details up close. Like latter-day Mouths of Truth, they wield dark humor and grotesque exaggeration to challenge social conventions and gender expectations, imagining alternatives to prescribed codes of behavior. Prices start at €600.
In another room, Los Angeles gallery Make Room pairs small recent paintings by Aleza Zheng with a new canvas and three editioned double-layered crystal vessels by Italian artist Jacopo Pagin . Extending his exploration of how images, materials and perceptual ambiguity generate imaginary spaces, Pagin moves between painting and sculptural objects that blur ornament, illusion and representation. Paintings are priced around €15,000 and the crystal pieces at around €9,000.
A Temporary Place by Pakistani artist Ajea Zahid , presented by Hatch Gallery , was conceived in direct response to the Monnaie de Paris’s historic interiors. The installation features a large painting mounted within a freestanding structure assembled from reclaimed wooden doors reminiscent of those in the artist’s childhood home. The resulting makeshift shelter becomes a symbolic threshold between memory and the present, reflecting on displacement, impermanence and the constantly shifting meaning of home.
Leila Heller Gallery is presenting pieces by Iranian artist Morteza Khosravi , whose psychologically charged figurative paintings explore the body as a repository of memory, violence and lived experience. Mining cinematic and archival sources, including Pier Paolo Pasolini , his fragmented imagery examines how personal and collective histories become inscribed in the flesh. The works are priced between €5,000 and €14,400.
Downstairs, Chicago gallery Tala is showing works by Filipino artist Jon Cuyson that extend his project for the Philippines Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale . Centered on the Filipino seafarers and relationships maintained across vast distances, “Sea of Love / Dagat ng Pag-ibig” challenged the invisibility of the labor underpinning global commerce while weaving together personal memory, mythology and collective history. Here, smaller works from the Venice series are priced at around €2,000.
Rebranded from Place des Vosges to align with its Los Angeles counterpart, Chris Sharp’s dealer-led fair has expanded into two buildings on Rue du Temple: No. 74 and an hôtel particulier at No. 79 that shares a courtyard with Marian Goodman. With 34 international galleries mounting solo and two-artist booths, the expanded fair still bears the unmistakable imprint of Sharp’s curatorial sensibility, favoring post-minimalist aesthetics, material experimentation and conceptual rigor.
“Against the backdrop of a difficult weekend, we had an incredible opening day, welcoming almost 1,000 visitors,” Sharp told Observer. “Many dealers reported sales, engaging conversations and an overall positive response. I was particularly pleased to see several collectors spending well over an hour at the fair, a testament to the depth of engagement.”
Making its Paris debut, São Paulo’s Yehudi Hollander-Pappi brings together Renata Haar and Luca Milano , whose works approach abstraction through radically different relationships with nature and time. Haar considers geological deep time through an almost collaborative relationship with stone, intervening in the material’s existing textures and formations rather than imposing a predetermined image. Priced between €10,000 and €15,000, her works set up a compelling dialogue with Milano’s constructed landscapes, poised between abstraction and representation.
Tokyo’s Tomio Koyama Gallery, which participates in both Paris Internationale and Post-Fair, is presenting a playful, approachable selection of works by Tomoko Nagai . Well established in Asia, with recent solo exhibitions at Perrotin in Seoul and Hong Kong, Nagai creates whimsical, dreamlike worlds populated by animals, children, flowers and domestic objects, moving freely among memory, fantasy and everyday observation (€850-12,000).
Chris Sharp Gallery ’s own presentation reinforces the post-minimalist, materially sensitive approach that runs through much of the fair, pairing Richard Rezac’s precisely constructed, Shaker-like sculptural objects with Anna Glantz’s restrained still lifes and suspended forms. Both artists investigate how modest arrangements and subtle formal gestures can charge ordinary materials and familiar objects with unexpected psychological and symbolic resonance. (Rezac’s sculptures are priced around €50,000.)
New York’s YveYANG introduces two young Düsseldorf-based painters, Pauline Rintsch and Kim Stolz , in a presentation exploring the relationship between painting and its physical support. While Stolz pursues a meditative abstraction, building geometric compositions through repeated marks and layered strokes, Rintsch conjures unstable figurative worlds in which translucent layers of paint animate ambiguous gestures and enigmatically framed scenes that waver between tenderness and discomfort. Prices range from €3,000 to €5,000.
One of the most intellectually layered and visually compelling presentations at the fair comes from Shanghai’s BROWNIE Project, which has brought Tan Mu’s Signal series. Tan translates complex structures (submarine fiber-optic cables, circuits, data systems and celestial constellations) into paintings and sculptures that poetically map invisible networks of communication, memory and interdependence connecting us to one another and to a larger cosmic order, revealing how the same patterns recur at micro and macro scales. Combining paint with unconventional materials such as memory cards and thread, along with small musical mechanisms carrying hidden messages, the artist turns technological devices into repositories of human experience. The works also expose the complexity of the systems that mediate our relationship with the world—systems whose constant updates reshape our very perception of it. Priced between €5,000 and €20,000, the works on view belong to an interconnected, research-driven practice in which each image becomes a fragment of a larger archive, meticulously documented and shared on the artist’s website.
Margot Samel is showing Swiss-Colombian artist Gina Proenza , whose work explores the fluidity of cultural identity and the unstable relationship among materials, images and symbols, questioning how meaning shifts as it moves across languages and contexts. Her materially experimental pieces are paired with atmospheric interiors by Jill Tate , who uses her background in photography to construct carefully staged, dramatically lit scenes before transferring them to canvas. Home, in her work, is less a physical place than a psychological and emotional construct, caught between familiarity and estrangement. Notably, Proenza also features in an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo this week, ahead of a presentation with the gallery later this year.