How Asia NOW and Design Miami.Paris Are Setting New Standards for Focus and Form

Two fairs that have carved out distinct identities and audiences in Paris’s increasingly crowded fair ecosystem opened on October 21 alongside Paris Internationale: Asia NOW and Design Miami.Paris. The former, now in its 10th edition, has established itself as the leading—and truly the only—platform dedicated to showcasing Asian contemporary art abroad by filling a niche no one addressed before. Since 2015, founders Alexandra and Claude Fain have mounted the fair in the spectacular Le Monnaie in Paris. Conceived in response to the longstanding underrepresentation of Asian art in Europe’s institutional and commercial scenes, Asia NOW positioned itself from the outset as both market and cultural platform—“an art fair with a curatorial soul.” Through thoughtful collaborations with curators, institutions and foundations, it has maintained that balance, with a curated selection and an expansive performance program that elevates the fairgoing experience beyond the transactional.

Among the highlights this year, 193 Gallery (Paris) welcomed visitors with a poetic solo presentation by Sumakshi Singh, whose nylon-and-silk embroideries reimagine India’s architectural heritage as fragile symbols of cultural memory. Presented in collaboration with Exhibit329 (India) and curated by TAK Contemporary (Paris) as part of this year’s new section, Third Space, the show merges multiple perspectives, traditions and geographies. Singh’s works—some inspired by iconic buildings and one by the staircase of her childhood home in Delhi—translate history and personal memory into ghostly architectural embroideries: life-size yet ephemeral, articulated yet delicate. Priced between €25,000-32,000, Singh’s textile architectures serve as explorations of impermanence and modernization, where heritage becomes both vessel and warning—a reminder of what is erased in the name of progress and of the traditions and stories that persist invisibly beneath it.

Nearby, several of the fair’s international participants seized the opportunity to highlight artists exploring the intersection of politics, language and form. Esther Schipper presented Cemile Sahin’s new series of video and two-dimensional works, expanding the German-Kurdish artist’s signature dialogue between image, text and power. Known for her filmic installations and A.I.-inflected visual language, Sahin merges gaming aesthetics with the poetics of surveillance to examine how narratives of war, exile and resistance are constructed. Her works balance seduction and critique, framing technology as both instrument and battleground. Meanwhile, Berlin’s Carlier | Gebauer paired Maria Taniguchi’s “brick” paintings—each a monumental study in repetition and time—with Iman Issa’s conceptual still-life photographs. The presentation offered a quietly cerebral dialogue, juxtaposing the materiality of Taniguchi’s hand-painted grids with Issa’s distilled symbols—a conversation between surface and structure, abstraction and metaphor.

Further down the corridors, Arario Gallery featured fast-rising Korean artist Lee Jinju, whose delicate compositions turn gesture into language, balancing dream and diagram, action and symbol. Priced around €21,500, the works explore intimacy, anxiety and the coded rituals of domestic life. Tang Contemporary presented a striking selection by the ever-provocative Filipino artist Manuel Ocampo (€11,000-45,000), whose densely symbolic paintings fuse Western iconography with Filipino folklore to satirize colonial ideology through dark humor and baroque absurdity.

New Mexico City gallery Third Born showcased young South Korean artist Jay Hur, a recent graduate of the Slade School in London, who presented two exquisite semiological maps painted on Hanji paper—ethereal, symbolic and fragile emotional cartographies priced around €1,500. Her intimate, veiled compositions isolate visual cues into quiet existential narratives that move between the physical and the spiritual, the personal and the ancestral. Following her success at NADA New York, the gallery placed six of her works on the first day, all under €5,000.

Stems Gallery (Brussels) presented Arghavan Khosravi’s intricately symbolic paintings (€40,000-50,000), merging Persian iconography and feminist surrealism with a refined architectural sense of composition. In the next room, Capsule Shanghai, in collaboration with Berlin’s KLEMM’S, featured the visionary work of Hong Kong-based artist Leelee Chan, whose urban post-industrial relics transform the debris of mass production into sculptural platforms for hybrid regeneration. Drawing inspiration from Hong Kong’s landscape—where concrete and nature continually overtake one another—her sculptures evoke a city in perpetual flux. Uncannily alien, they hover between the biological and the futuristic, like artifacts from a parallel civilization unearthed in real time. According to Chan, her fascination with ruins stems partly from her upbringing: her parents are antiques dealers, and that early exposure to historical objects deeply shaped her sensitivity to material memory. In her smaller works, fragments of ancient artifacts coexist with industrial scrap, forming hybrid organisms that mirror Hong Kong itself—an ecosystem where decay and regeneration are inseparable.

Under the grand tent, in front of the now-familiar dim sum-and-champagne brunch that has become part of Asia NOW’s opening ritual, Gallery 2 made its long-awaited debut. The Korean gallery presented a solo exhibition by Eunsae Lee, a distinctive voice among Korea’s emerging generation. Lee’s work inhabits the tension between digital imagery and embodied experience, confronting unfiltered visual and psychological noise with an equally raw form of expression. Her pieces navigate the pressures of female identity, self-representation and visibility—particularly within altered, hyper-mediated states—transforming distortion into a form of truth.

Under the same roof, Galerie Vazieux reported strong sales for Moonassi, whose meditative ink figures continue to captivate collectors with their minimalist, psychological intimacy following successful showings in Seoul and Tokyo. Meanwhile, LJ Gallery paired Lily Wong and Rudson Khizanishvili, two painters who use symbolic figuration to chart internal landscapes of emotion and myth—a fitting close to a fair that balanced sensitivity with sharp intellectual rigor. “Once again, Asia NOW brought together some of the best collectors, curators and institutions, with a very busy first day,” Adeline Jeuny, founder of LJ Gallery, told Observer. “The fair is off to a very positive start, although most of us have noticed collectors are doing an initial tour of all four fairs that opened today. We’re waiting for confirmations later in the week,” she added with a laugh. “I also feel like I spoke more English than French all day—so many European collectors I hadn’t seen in years were finally back in Paris.”

The collectible design market’s broader audience

For some, it was the first stop on the champagne-brunch trail; for others, the last chance to savor pure beauty in an elegant setting—but one pre-Basel constant is Design Miami.Paris. Hosted again this year in the elegant Hôtel de Maisons and opening on Wednesday, October 21, the fair dedicated entirely to collectible design marked its third edition with a focus on dialogue between history and experimentation. Here, craftsmanship, functionality and imagination converge, offering a more immediate and inclusive appeal than fine art—a reflection of the rapidly expanding market for collectible design.

Carpenters Workshop Gallery staged an elegant dialogue between art and design, modernity and tradition, craftsmanship and innovation. From Nacho Carbonell’s luminous, organic forms—alive with porous tactility—to the quiet poetry of Aki and Arnaud Cooren’s minimalism, every work carried a sense of physical intimacy. The booth also featured pieces by Maarten Baas, Ingrid Donat and Vincenzo De Cotiis, reaffirming Carpenters’ ability to bridge material innovation and emotion, the organic and the industrial. The gallery reported a buoyant start, with strong collector engagement and six-figure sales across works by Carbonell, Vincent Dubourg, De Cotiis and ceramic artist Gareth Mason—proof, as its director told Observer, of the continued strength of the collectible design market.

Galerie Mitterand went full Lalanne, presenting an ensemble of the duo’s fantastical creatures, including a small rhino, crocodile chair, flower table and mirror, with two turtles extending the display outdoors. The booth captured Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne’s timeless zoomorphic surrealism—equal parts pastoral and primal—where floral ornament and sculptural rigor coexist. Their enduring animal menagerie continues to channel the dream logic of modern design, enchanting collectors of all ages and from every corner of the world, as only fairy tales can.

Another leading design gallery, New York-based Friedman Benda, presented a selection of works emblematic of its multigenerational and globally diverse program. Representing both established and emerging designers—as well as historically significant estates spanning five continents and five generations—the gallery continues to broaden the dialogue in design by foregrounding perspectives that have long been marginalized. Exploring the intersections of design, craft, architecture, art and technological research, Friedman Benda’s presentation included works by Wendell Castle, Carmen D’Apollonio, Andile Dyalvane, Frida Escobedo, Formafantasma, Misha Kahn, Joris Laarman, Fernando Laposse, Raphael Navot, Adam Pendleton and Samuel Ross.

Eric Philippe’s stand delivered a masterclass in curatorial harmony, pairing American Modernism with Finnish design from the 1950s and Swedish craftsmanship of the 1930s. Divided into three sections, it featured a striking table by Chicago architect Samuel Marx alongside rare Nordic treasures, including a Paavo Tynell floor lamp and Birger Kaipiainen ceramics. The presentation unfolded as a meditation on mid-century balance—between warmth and precision, geometry and grace.

A futuristic spirit defined the “Designers of Tomorrow” showcase, a collaboration between Design Miami and Apple spotlighting Duyi Han, Marco Campardo, Jolie Ngo and the duo Marie & Alexandre—all using iPads as a tool to expand their creative vocabularies. The exhibition revealed how digital design informs tactile experimentation from concept to completion. Among the highlights, Jolie Ngo’s table lamp in cherry blossom resin and Himalayan salt glowed like a living organism—both technological and tender.

Milan-based design dealer Rossella Colombari dedicated her booth to 20th-century Italian design, with refined works by Nanda Vigo, Fornasetti and a beautiful sofa by Osvaldo Borsani, priced around €25,000.

Right next door, Danish-born, Paris-based gallery Marie Wittergren made an elegant debut with a presentation that felt like a quiet exploration of form and fragility. Bringing together designers from across continents, the gallery’s selection centered on material sensitivity and the poetics of impermanence. Highlights included Hyejeong Ko’s Beyond Time vessel—an ode to the transient beauty of flowers—and Gjertrud Hals’ ethereal sea-thread sculptures. Yves Salomon Editions, meanwhile, unveiled a collaboration with Pierre Marie, whose dreamlike suite of seats, poufs and lights unfolded like a pastoral fresco between The Prairie and The Firmament, merging plush tactility with jewel-like ornamentation. By the second day, the gallery had confirmed brisk sales, including Camilla Moberg’s luminous sculpture, Inhwa Lee’s refined white ceramics, works by Rasmus Fenhann and Hals’ intricate pieces—clear proof that today’s design market flourishes when innovation and craftsmanship meet integrity and accessibility.

Barcelona’s Side Gallery focused on the rediscovery of Japanese modern design from the mid-20th century, centered on Tendo Mokko and figures such as Isamu Kenmochi, Junzo Sakakura, Riki Watanabe, Saburo Inui and Ubunji Kidokoro. Examining Japan’s postwar evolution from craft to industrial design, it highlighted the molded plywood innovations that defined its modernist identity. Expanding on the gallery’s earlier research into South American, particularly Brazilian, design, the presentation drew parallels between Watanabe’s 1960s work and contemporary Brazilian reinterpretations through Tendo Mokko’s São Paulo studio. Priced at €6,000-8,000, the pieces embodied the organic balance, experimental materiality and traditional craftsmanship linking Japanese and Brazilian modernism, offering collectors a rare opportunity to acquire historically significant works at accessible prices.

The most engaging sensory moments of the fair unfolded outdoors in the garden. Beyond the allure of the continuously flowing Perrier-Jouët champagne, visitors could experience the Resonant Ping Pong Dining Table by James de Wulf, which transformed an ordinary game into an acoustic and participatory ritual, reattuning sound, movement and play into a shared sensory dialogue.

Equally multisensory was The Soul Garden, imagined by Indian designer Vikram Goyal and presented by The Future Perfect—a verdant sanctuary offering new fables for turbulent times. Conceived by Goyal in collaboration with pioneering olfactory artist Sissel Tolaas, the installation centered on five brass animal sculptures created with the New Delhi designer’s signature hollowed joinery and repoussé techniques, surrounded by seating and grasses embedded with nano-scent activators. Priced between €25,000 and €42,000, each brass creature carried its own scent, captured by Tolaas during visits to Goyal’s New Delhi studio, where she recorded smell molecules from the metalworking process and from real animals in their habitats, later analyzing and reproducing them to form distinct olfactory identities. The installation paid homage to the Panchatantra—India’s ancient collection of moral animal fables written in Sanskrit over 2,000 years ago and said to have inspired Aesop’s tales—while honoring the enduring reverence for animals in Indian philosophy. “In India, animals are more than instinct; they are sacred, sentient, divine. Many embody essential virtues—strength, wisdom, loyalty, tranquility,” Goyal explained. “This recognition of their spiritual equivalence has led to their protection and veneration for centuries.”

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How Asia NOW and Design Miami.Paris Are Setting New Standards for Focus and Form

The collectible design market’s broader audience

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