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 … Click here to read more