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.