Art & Market and Fashion & Market: Building Networks in Southeast Asia

Art & Market (A&M), launched in October 2018, is a multimedia platform that presents specialist content on Southeast Asian art, featuring its community’s artistic, curatorial and business practices. Fashion & Market (FAM), launched in May 2021, is modelled on A&M, and focuses on the regional fashion community’s interdisciplinary practices.

As a journalist and an academic, I seek to document activities and trends in the regional art and fashion scenes in a well-researched way that has not only reach but longevity. Simultaneously, I aim to work with emerging writers, to allow for their voices to be heard and honed. These principles have guided me in creating accessible, growing archives of Southeast Asian art and fashion content. 

One of the ways that A&M innovated during the Covid-19 pandemic was to organise Pivot, the first online conference on Southeast Asian art, in 2020. Stakeholders spoke about how they were dealing with the myriad curveballs, with short-term safeguards and long-term plans. Since then, we have organised other similar events, including the Singapore Art Week talks series in partnership with the National Arts Council in 2021and 2022, and farther afield with the Front and (Off-)Centre: Fashion and Southeast Asia conference at The Courtauld Research Forum in 2023.

To keep A&M and FAM going means to consistently put out engaging content, and equally important, funding the work of the core teams and freelance contributors. This presentation reflects upon the value, development and sustainability of both network-building platforms as part of media and academia.

Nadya Wang is editor of Art & Market (A&M) and Fashion & Market (FAM), which feature practices and processes within the Southeast Asian art and fashion communities respectively. She is host of From A to Zig-Zag, a podcast spotlighting creative practices in the region, and co-host of the vodcast In the Vitrine which ruminates on the business, culture and pleasures of fashion in Asia and beyond. Nadya is a full-time lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore. In 2022, she was awarded a PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art.

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