Expanded Horizons: The Asian Cultural Council Announces 2025 Grant Recipients

In a cultural moment marked by dissonance and displacement, the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) has chosen a different register: one of attunement, listening, and the long arc of exchange. This month, the New York-based nonprofit announced its 2025 Asia Grant Cycle recipients: 37 artists, curators, architects, scholars, and choreographers whose practices reimagine movement, language, and the soft power of presence across geographic and disciplinary lines. The total disbursement, $920,371, signals financial support and a deliberate investment in the promise of cultural reciprocity.

Since its founding in 1963, ACC has offered more than funding; it has offered time, space, and context. It has supported over 6,000 exchanges in 26 countries, with the idiosyncratic understanding that a meaningful artistic inquiry often requires stepping into the unknown. What distinguishes the ACC model is its refusal to instrumentalize culture as output. Here, culture is not produced but lived.

This year’s cohort comprises 16 New York Fellows, 18 Individual Fellows, and three Graduate Fellows, all selected for projects that span street photography, speculative puppetry, vernacular architecture, and cross border dramaturgy. If the geography is transnational, the methodology is equally expansive: immersive residencies, field research, artistic collaborations, and independent inquiry that push against the limits of form and habit.

The New York Fellowship, ACC’s flagship immersion program, invites artists from Asia to live and work in New York for six months, offering not just proximity to the city’s cultural institutions but, more crucially, to its frictions and flux. For visual artist I Hsuen Chen (Taiwan ROC), whose practice pivots between performance, installation, and photography, the city becomes both subject and foil, a space to interrogate the image as artifact and architecture. Dancer and actor tsu tsu (Japan) arrives with a body based practice rooted in classical forms yet oriented toward the contemporary; their work enacts a kind of corporeal historiography, one performance at a time.

Filmmaker Maria Estela Paiso (Philippines), known for mixed media works that float between montage and memory, joins theater artist and playwright J mee Katanyag in this year’s New York cohort. Both artists, though working in distinct mediums, share a dramaturgical impulse: a desire to stage silences, to listen to what remains unsaid.

ACC does not position New York as a fixed center but as a node in a dynamic cartography. This cartography becomes a speculative field for the Individual Fellows, one navigated through archival dives, open ended collaborations, and site specific immersions in 11 countries and regions. For example, literary scholar Summer Cat (Hong Kong SAR) explores the interstice between visual culture and poetry, producing works that blur the line between scholarly research and aesthetic proposition. Meanwhile, composer and sound poet Tomomi Adachi (Japan) mobilizes voice and self built instruments to perform sonic disruptions of the everyday.

These are not exchanges in the transactional sense; they are conversations that unfold over time, across thresholds. In this light, the ACC fellowship is less about arrival than becoming, less about outcomes than about presence.

The inclusion of three Graduate Fellows from the Philippines speaks to ACC’s commitment to access and equity, particularly in under resourced fields. Aina Ramolete, currently pursuing an MFA in Puppet Arts at the University of Connecticut, is emblematic of the cohort’s experimental rigor and cultural rootedness. Her work, at once archival and inventive, links folk traditions with contemporary performance, transforming puppetry into a political and pedagogical tool.

What’s striking about this year’s grantees is not just their individual excellence but their collective assertion that cultural practice is, at its core, relational. Architect Zhu Ning (Mainland China) focuses on sustainable design not as a trend but as a transhistorical ethic. Visual artist Ye Wuji (Mainland China) repurposes archival images and found texts to probe the boundaries of rumor, memory, and meme. Their projects do not simply occupy space; they reconfigure it.

If there is a throughline here, it is the idea that cultural exchange is not an event but a practice, a way of dwelling in difference. As Executive Director Judy Kim notes, this year’s fellows are “an exceptional group” engaged in “unique cultural exchange activities,” from fieldwork in urban spaces to collaborations in regional theatres. These engagements are not supplemental to artistic practice; they are its very grammar.

In our hyper mediated present, the notion of encounter has become flattened, often reduced to digital traces or performative gestures. ACC’s approach is refreshingly analog, even intimate. The grants offer a scaffold, but the grantees build the architecture: through slow research, deep dialogue, and radical hospitality.

This ethic, of encounter, of curiosity without conquest, might be the ACC’s most radical offering. It gestures toward a future not of global monoculture, but of pluralities held in tension, in conversation, in care.

In the end, supporting cultural exchange is not simply to fund travel or translation. It is to make a wager on mutuality, on the belief that knowledge is not given but made between people, across distances, over time.

For more on the 2025 grantees and their projects, visit asianculturalcouncil.org. The next global application cycle opens in Fall 2025.