A–Z of Southeast Asian Art: A Critical Dictionary
Muara Arts, Kuala Lumpur
Nov 1–TBA

What connects Southeast Asia’s diverse societies, and where do attempts to define the region fall short? Muara Arts, a new institution in Kuala Lumpur led by artistic director Lydia Yee, opens with “A–Z of Southeast Asian Art: A Critical Dictionary,” an exhibition that approaches these questions through an alphabetical framework. Taking its cue from Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2017– ), the show organizes works by more than 40 artists—including Marcos Kueh, Martha Atienza, Christine Ay Tjoe, and Tiffany Chung—around keywords ranging from animism and archipelago to corruption and zoomorphism. Spanning painting, sculpture, video, and installation, their practices offer varied perspectives on Southeast Asia’s artistic and cultural complexity.

Lee Ufan
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Nov 7–Apr 4, 2027

Museum Ludwig honors Lee Ufan, recipient of the 2026 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, with an exhibition dedicated to his work. A leading theorist of Japan’s Mono-ha movement and a seminal figure in Korea’s Dansaekhwa, Lee developed a practice centered on encounters between space, substance, and audience. His measured brushwork and spare sculptural environments challenge the artwork’s status as a self-contained autonomous object, directing attention to the relationships that constitute the experience of it. The presentation offers an occasion to reconsider his sustained inquiry into gesture, material presence, and perception.

Zadie Xa 
in situ
Guggenheim Bilbao
Nov 19–Apr 11, 2027

Korean Canadian artist Zadie Xa joins the Guggenheim Bilbao’s “in situ” series, which invites artists to develop site-specific works for the museum. Curated by Lekha Hileman, the exhibition presents an artist for whom multisensory storytelling connects the diasporic experience with imagined worlds. Korean mythology, shamanistic traditions, and science fiction inform a practice that moves between performance, painting, and sculptural installation. Xa constructs speculative worlds in which inherited stories become tools for questioning identity and historical authority. Hybrid beings, protective symbols, and narratives of transformation recur throughout her work, connecting cultural transmission with the imaginative possibilities of belonging.

Gulnur Mukazhanova
The Manifold of Memory
The Whitworth, Manchester
Nov 20–May 16, 2027

Gulnur Mukazhanova’s first UK institutional exhibition, “The Manifold of Memory,” transforms the Whitworth into an expansive textile landscape. Commissioned in partnership with the Bagri Foundation, the site-specific installation combines felt, silk, and vintage fabrics, drawing on the artist’s Kazakh heritage and Central Asia’s nomadic traditions. Felt’s longstanding use in shelters, clothing, and everyday objects informs her exploration of how materials preserve cultural knowledge. Developed through research into the museum’s collection, the work enlarges a fragment into a monumental environment, considering how motifs once charged with spiritual and communal significance shift in meaning as they circulate beyond their original contexts.

Rubaiya Qatar
Various Locations, Doha
Nov 21–Apr 30, 2027

Rubaiya Qatar, a new international contemporary art quadrennial, launches in November with exhibitions, commissions, public art, residencies, and publications. Its headline show, “Unruly Waters,” is curated by Tom Eccles, Ruba Katrib, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, and Mark Rappolt, and will be presented at ALRIWAQ Arts + Architecture. Bringing together more than 50 artists—including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Farah Al Qasimi, Liu Chuang, Shilpa Gupta, and Ayman Zedani—and over 20 new commissions, the exhibition considers water as an agent of environmental and historical change. Migration, commerce, and ecological interdependence frame its examination of Qatar’s connections with regions in the Gulf, Asia, and beyond, bringing natural forces into an account of global exchange.

Lin Tianmiao and Wang Gongxin
Here and There
M+, Hong Kong
Dec 4–May 9, 2027

Lin Tianmiao and Wang Gongxin’s Here? or There? (2002) receives its first Hong Kong presentation at M+. Commissioned for the 2002 Shanghai Biennale and subsequently shown in Europe and the US, the collaboration combines Lin’s elaborate fabric and human-hair costumes with Wang’s six-channel video. The installation unsettles familiar distinctions between the real and the imagined, registering the psychological tensions of rapid social change. Presented alongside Wang’s Dialogue (1995/2017) and Lin’s The Black Sameness (2011), it brings their distinct approaches to material and moving images into a shared exploration of uncertainty and the dichotomies of safety and danger, hope and despair.

Harison Butler is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.