October 2026 Round-Up
Art Jakarta 2026, Whitestone Gallery, The Back Room, Liang Gallery, artcommune gallery and Vin Gallery
Art Jakarta 2026
Venue entrance of Art Jakarta 2025. Image courtesy of Art Jakarta.
The upcoming edition of Art Jakarta will host 75 galleries — 33 arrive from overseas, and 19 are first-time participants. It will introduce a new section, SCOPE, which presents MTN Market, a platform highlighting emerging Indonesian art fairs and local art communities from outside of Jakarta. This edition also welcomes new Main Partners. AIA presents The Living Legacy, a collaboration with the batik maestro Iwan Tirta and Aesop brings its signature Aesop Women’s Library, an ongoing initiative that brings literature by female authors and local voices.
Art Jakarta 2026 runs from 2 to 4 October 2026 at JIExpo Kemayoran, Jakarta, Indonesia. More information here.
Counterweight: The Systems of Two
Ruobing & Sai, Eight Legged on Back (Green for Something series), 2014, used coffeeshop plastic chairs, 160 x 40 x 50cm. Image courtesy of Whitestone Gallery Singapore.
The exhibition centres on two Singapore artist couples: Stefen Chow and Huiyi Lin alongside Wang Ruobing and Chen Sai Kua Kuan. Curated by Tamares Goh, the show takes physics as its primary metaphor for shared life, casting each partnership as the point of balance on a lever. Chow and Lin turn rigorous research, raw data and everyday objects into precise visual forms, while Ruobing & Sai work by trial and error with residues and fragments gathered from their daily environment, the land and sea. For both, domestic life spills into the work, and the private unit becomes a means of navigating the world. Each duo is framed as a small system held steady within a larger, turbulent one.
Counterweight: The Systems of Two is on view from 16 August to 17 October 2026 at Whitestone Gallery Singapore, Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore. More information here.
Missing from the Scene
Sharon Chin, Missing Actors series, 2026, linoprint on Kitakata paper, 37.5 × 28cm each. Images courtesy of Sharon Chin.
Missing from the Scene is Malaysian artist Sharon Chin’s first solo exhibition in Kuala Lumpur since 2017, curated by Eric Goh. It features wayang kulit-style animal puppets, collagraph prints made from them, and linocut prints of their habitats, but with the animals absent. The title is a play on mise-en-scène, suggesting that absence is the setting of life today. The empty habitats point to the loss of biodiversity, while a live feed of an oil refinery’s flare stack, seen from Chin’s home in Port Dickson, forms their backdrop. The show is accompanied by a zine publication, featuring essays by Eric Goh, Azzad Diah and Nau Suter, along with a questionnaire, asking audiences: “What is missing from your scene?”
Missing from the Scene is on view from 26 September to 1 November 2026 at The Back Room, The Zhongshan Building, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Mirror Straits
Chu Wei-Bor, Breaking to Build (不破不立), 1997, mixed media, cotton, 138.5 x 92cm. Image courtesy of Liang Gallery.
Organised by Liang Gallery in Taipei and artcommune gallery in Singapore, Mirror Straits is a touring exhibition that brings together four artists from Taiwan and four from Singapore. Curated by Nobuo Takamori, the show first introduced Singaporean audiences to Taiwan’s modern masters in January. The Taipei edition brings together Singapore artists Cheong Soo Pieng, Chen Wen Hsi, Tan Choh Tee and Wong Keen and Taiwan artists Yuyu Yang, Chi Wei-Bor, Chin Jun-Tso and Chen Ching-Jung. Taiwan and Singapore are both tropical islands, but their distinct colonial and post-war histories have shaped different forms of collective memory. The exhibition asks what narratives might emerge between two seemingly mirrored islands.
Mirror Straits is on view from 12 September to 8 November 2026 at Liang Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan. More information here.
Heirloom
Duong Thuy Nguyen, Songs for the Unremembered (film still), 2026, single-channel moving image, colour, sound, 15 min 06 sec, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Vin Gallery.
Vietnamese artist Duong Thuy Nguyen’s exhibition, Heirloom, turns to a different kind of inheritance, one handed down across generations but never wanted. It is Agent Orange, known locally as chất độc màu da cam. Nguyen started from a question about carrying a history that began before her birth, yet it lives on in bodies, landscapes and family memory. Rooted in Nguyen’s research at the Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University, the show places new works alongside military maps, declassified documents, archival film and oral histories. At its centre is Songs for the Unremembered (2026), a new moving-image work that traces Agent Orange’s path from striped barrels to Vietnam’s forests.
Heirloom is on view from 19 September to 20 November 2026 at Vin Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
