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Gối — Hot & Hotter Seasons — Digital Painting — The painting demonstrates how digital visual language can merge with traditional illustration without losing its artistic presence. Although the image strongly evokes the atmosphere of the AI era, no AI was involved in the artist’s process. The artist intentionally chose a method of flat image construction that she believed AI still could not fully imitate, creating a quiet tension between handmade authorship and synthetic visual culture. In this sense, AI indirectly pushes human art toward other formal directions even through absence, turning the work into a subtle form of silent confrontation. Beneath its neon surface, the painting also carries a nostalgic mourning for the decline of Saigon’s old bourgeois world, allowing it to stand in emotional opposition to the flattened unreality of speculative digital futures.
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Gối — Bích Khê Tray — Ceramic — Bích Khê (1916–1946) – a central figure of Vietnamese Symbolism – did not depict women as physical subjects but as spectral disturbances moving through language. In Tranh Lõa Thể, the body dissolves into perfume, light, rhythm, and fever, becoming less a human figure than a psychic apparition briefly intercepted by poetry. In an era where AI can already imitate poetic structure through statistical language prediction, Symbolist poetry remains difficult to fully replicate precisely because of its unstable symbolic layering, overlapping metaphors, and irrational emotional syntax. Decades later, Gối produced this tray as a sensory transfer device, isolating the poet’s hallucination and migrating it into physical form. The artist ultimately frames the object as a derivative work not of narrative, but of Symbolist sensation itself.
Asahi Rokuji — Fission — Experimental Photography — The work combines photography with digital manipulation while refusing the polished visual logic now common in AI-generated imagery. Its awkwardness is intentional. Distortion and flatness are left exposed instead of corrected, turning visual discomfort into part of the image’s structure. Perhaps in the AI era, simply continuing to photograph real human beings already feels unusual enough, without needing technical spectacle to justify it. The piece quietly suggests that human image-making may begin separating itself from synthetic culture not through perfection, but through forms of deliberate instability.
Gối — Soft Overflow — Mixed media — This mixed-media object treats synthetic resin as a counterfeit bodily fluid, allowing it to spill across ceramic surfaces as though the material itself were undergoing orgasmic collapse. As AI gradually extends its synthetic organism into more and more territories of visual culture, sculpture of this nature still remains strangely difficult to neutralize. Contemporary visual culture is increasingly dominated by polished forms engineered for frictionless circulation, where artworks are expected to behave almost like luxury interface design. As AI gradually extends its synthetic organism into that ecosystem, works built around instability become harder to economically discipline. This object survives precisely because it leaks. Its humanity exists not only in the emotion it evokes, but in the way the material itself refuses mechanical control..
Alexey Velikorodny — Aya Shalkar —Photography People once questioned the necessity of painting after the invention of photography. Today, a similar question begins to surround photography itself, as AI systems become increasingly capable of reproducing nearly every visual component associated with photographic image-making. What, then, continues to shape our immediate recognition of human presence within independent photography? Is it the model’s micro-expressions, or forms of imperfection that emerge unintentionally rather than being strategically constructed as aesthetic response? The photograph unintentionally becomes a compelling reminder of why certain human-made images continue to feel immediately recognizable.
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SEAthrough — How to Survive in S.E.A — Issue #01 — VÉ SỐ

The art continues inside ⟶

GET THE BOOK

Victoria Linkina, ANMOM, Prachhi Patel, Maggie Xin Wen, Sourajata, Sayeda Mehreen, Yuliya Lyubatinskaya, Kam Yew Chee, Odesso, Muchuan Chen, Pradip Kumar Sau, Lee Jia-An, Sayedur Rahman, Ian A-Kwakye, Tusk, 22, EV Zhang, Inessa Kalabekova, Julia Forrest, J LaRue, Jason Haynes

A lottery ticket is an ordinary street object in Vietnam and Thailand. It moves through the city in the hands of roaming vendors, many of them elderly or disabled, working without contracts or much of a safety net. Indonesia has a version too, togel, though it exists underground there; illegal under Islamic law and circulated through local bookies rather than sold openly on the street. These are not the same practice, and the lottery ticket is not proposed here as a symbol of Southeast Asia. It comes from the curator’s own connection to Vietnam.

The choice also determines how the issue looks. Its visual vocabulary is pulled directly from the ticket itself: neon and saturated colour, dense decorative patterning, sharp-edged rectangles and the compressed energy of something designed to catch attention in a crowded street. These elements recur throughout the illustrations and layouts. They are not decoration added to the concept afterwards; the ticket becomes the visual language of the book.

The cat girl belongs to the same system. She can stand for the curator, HFP, the Southeast Asian vantage point, or the artist looking outward from it. Her fusion of anime-influenced drawing and saturated colour keeps different influences visible at once, rather than resolving them into one clear source. That in-between quality matters here because the artists in this book do not come from one cultural source either; some may have a direct relationship with Southeast Asia, while others may have none at all. What brings them into the same book is not a shared origin, but the different ways their influences meet. Artists are often dismissed as dreamers because they see things differently. Here, that difference is not a performance of being unusual; it is simply what becomes visible when different ways of seeing occupy the same space.

Once origin stops being the only way to understand where something belongs, position becomes more interesting.

The lottery ticket opens another way into that question. For this issue, HFP borrows the block universe as a conceptual reference from physics. In the block universe view associated with relativity, there is no single universal “now”; past, present and future can be understood as different positions within the same spacetime. A lottery draw offers a strangely simple image for this. Before the announcement, the winning number appears undecided from where the buyer stands. In the block universe, however, the outcome is already part of the whole. The announcement does not create it; it marks the point at which that information becomes available from one particular position.

This is not a claim that physics proves the book’s argument. The block universe is simply a separate idea being borrowed because it offers a useful way to think about position. HFP’s own framework comes from postmodern thought, where meaning and identity are likewise approached without a single authoritative centre. What something is depends partly on where it is seen from and what it enters into relation with. The two ideas come from different fields, but they meet around the same structural problem: the assumption that there must be one privileged position from which everything else can be understood.

Southeast Asia enters Vé Số through this question of position. The region is not treated as a fixed identity or a set of characteristics that a work must visibly perform. It is a position within a larger field of relations.

Birth is one such position. No one chooses where they are born, and someone born in Southeast Asia carries that position before they can decide what it means. But the relation does not stop there. Someone who has never lived in Southeast Asia, never identified with it, or never thought about it is also positioned in relation to the region. So is the person who arrives later, leaves, stays, or looks from elsewhere.

Curated by Hoang-Dan Pham.


All artworks © the respective artists. All other text and design © Hand-Fetish-Projects®, 2026. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher or the artists.

SEAthrough — How to Survive in S.E.A — Issue #01 — VÉ SỐ

Length108 pages (excluding cover)
ReleaseOctober 2026
LanguageEnglish
FormatHardcover / PDF
ThemeAn artbook about position, relation, and what becomes visible when Southeast Asia is no longer treated as a fixed identity.

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