FIRST TAKES: Why We’re Here - Because Asian Culture Has Always Been Bigger Than We Admit

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Most of us in Asia didn’t grow up calling ourselves “art people.”
We grew up on pirated DVDs, Astro Wah Lai Toi, anime soundtracks on LimeWire, pasar malam crafts, K-pop we memorised without knowing Korean, Bollywood films our cousins made us watch, wuxia dramas our parents loved, murals on shophouse walls, temple festivals, family altars, karaoke rooms, and comics borrowed from that one classmate who refused to lend volume 9.

We grew up in culture — just not the kind we were told “counts.”

And that’s exactly why Art Padi exists.

Not to be fancy. Not to sound superior and definitely not to pretend that culture only happens in white cube galleries.

Art Padi begins with a simple belief:
Asia is overflowing with culture — we just need better ways of seeing it.

Culture isn’t only masterpieces in museums.
It’s the street food auntie perfecting her plates.
It’s Vietnamese water puppetry.
It’s Filipino jeepney paintings.
It’s Thai ghost festivals.
It’s Japanese secondhand bookstores tucked under train tracks.
It’s Indonesian batik studios with 50-year histories.
It’s Malaysian heritage shophouses graffiti’d with teenage ambition.
It’s the artists, dancers, filmmakers, ceramicists, subcultures, and traditions that form the living heartbeat of this region.

Padi means rice field — a place where things grow slowly, organically, from the ground up. And that’s how Asian culture works, too.

It doesn’t wait for institutional approval. It grows through people. Through communities. Through stories passed down, reinvented, misunderstood, revived again.

So what are we doing here?

First Takes
Quick, honest reactions to what’s happening across Asia — biennales, festivals, films, runway dramas, viral cultural moments, neighbourhood art surprises, and everything in between.

Features
Deep dives into artists, histories, ideas, and regional creative ecosystems — the kind that shape how we see and feel Asia.

Practice
Studio visits and conversations with makers: ceramicists in Jingdezhen, illustrators in Seoul, experimental dancers in Manila, traditional weavers in Bali, indie filmmakers in KL.

&Counter
A reflective space to ask harder questions:
What exactly is “Asian art”? Who gets to decide? What are we celebrating, overlooking, or misreading?

And most importantly, Art Padi is for people who are culturally curious.
Not experts.
Not insiders.
Just people who want to understand Asia in fuller, more intimate ways — without jargon, without elitism, without feeling excluded.

So here’s our first take:
Asia isn’t discovering its cultural voice — it has always had one.
We’re just learning how to listen.

Welcome to Art Padi. Let’s grow this field together.