The themed central exhibition of the Venice Biennale has made history by featuring mostly female and gender nonconforming artists. Yet “The Milk of Dreams”, titled after a book by the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, scores poorly when it comes to geographical diversity, with few works reflecting Asian perspectives. That and the absence of India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan in the national pavilion line-up means that Asian presence in Venice is relatively muted. Still, there are 18 pavilions from the region when the broadest definition of Asia as a geographic category is applied. Here are some of the most interesting ones apart from Hong Kong, which has been reviewed separately . China The group exhibition called “Meta-scape” is fascinating because all the artworks inside the dark and cavernous China pavilion seem to highlight the fluidity and imagined nature of places, as opposed to a homogeneous and exceptional “traditional Chinese culture”. The art lovers paying big money to be patrons of China’s private museums In the centre of the dreamlike setting is Wang Yuyang’s eight-metre-long suspended sculpture Quarterly (2021), which looks like a spaceship has smashed into a tree. It is supposedly made by a computer algorithm called “artist”. Next to it is Liu Jiayu’s large model of a sprawling mountain range that is, again, the product of feeding a huge amount of geographic data of Chinese mountains into an artificial intelligence program. What comes through strongly in the collection of artworks, which also include pieces by Xu Lei and AT Group, is a feeling that the rise of the age of the machine will overwhelm existing boundaries that humankind is used to. Macau YiiMa, which means “The Twins” in Mandarin, have made a remarkable series of photographs that fit perfectly with the Surrealist theme of this edition of the Venice Biennale. The two middle-aged Chinese men – Ung Vai Meng and Chan Hin Io – photograph themselves while performing as putti (winged, naked cherubs) in locations in Macau that they fear will soon be demolished and forgotten as the world’s biggest gambling capital continues its breakneck development. The large circular photographs in “Allegory of Dreams” show the two in scenes reminiscent of the illusionary perspective of the many ceiling murals adorning many Venetian palazzos, and refer to Macau’s long history as a deeply Catholic society given its more than 400 years as a Portuguese colony until 1999. Each image, for example one taken inside a long-established family-owned metal workshop, is accompanied by a detailed annotated document as a way to archive histories that are too easily overwhelmed by large historical trends. Mongolia Munkhtsetseg “Mugi” Jalkhaajav’s “A Journey Through Vulnerability” is a series of mostly silver-coloured soft sculptures that are part-animal, part-human. They look futuristic and shamanistic, as the artist creates a dreamlike world – with background music made by traditional Jew’s harps – that mourns the miscarriage of her own child, the terrible fate of animals, the possibility of healing and reincarnation. Nepal As is often the case with private efforts to bring a national pavilion to Venice, the inaugural Nepalese exhibition is the result of creative thinking and expansive collaborations. In this case, the indefatigable Sangeeta Thapa, whose Siddhartha Arts Foundation has just launched Kathmandu Triennale 2077, was instrumental in arranging artist Tserin Sherpa’s solo exhibition at the Biennale with support from other Nepalese institutions, the Rubin Museum of Art and Rossi & Rossi art gallery. With just two months to prepare for the exhibition, Tserin worked with Nepalese metalwork master Bijay Maharjan to make a 350kg (770lb) bronze hanging sculpture that is an amalgamation of dozens of pairs of limbs styled from the deities seen in traditional Tibetan Buddhist thangka paintings. Shown with installations and paintings, the work succinctly and beautifully expresses the problematic idea of the Himalayas as a timeless, fetishised ideal, while also revealing, through a simple image of a carpet loom, the complex history of colonisation and displacement in the region. Levitation and levity in 2022 Venice Biennale’s Hong Kong pavilion Singapore The Singapore pavilion, presented in an elegantly designed maze constructed with semitranslucent paper, is the latest chapter of Shubigi Rao’s 10-year project “Pulp”, which records the different forms of violence that lead to the disappearance of books, languages, knowledge and peoples. “Pulp III: A Short Biography of the Banished Book” needs to be taken in slowly, for it consists of a thick volume of new writing by Rao and an hour-long film that document rare or rescued books in Venice and Singapore. Curator Ute Meta Bauer points out how the project has particular resonance at a time when wars are flaring up across the world. Art and culture are always under attack when people are attacked, and Rao – whose bibliophile parents once lost an entire library to theft – is determined not to let the perpetrators of quieter forms of violence get away with it. Painter of orchids on a colourful Hong Kong childhood at The Peninsula Taiwan The Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM) had three months to redraw plans for Venice after dropping indigenous artist Sakuliu Pavavaljung, who faces a number of rape and sexual harassment allegations. According to guest curator Patrick Flores, the decision to go ahead with a last-minute exhibition was a way to confront the situation rather than shy away from what happened with Pavavaljung, who declared himself innocent and remains under police investigation. The resulting exhibition, called “Impossible Dreams”, is an archive of all previous Taiwan presentations in Venice since 1995, when it was admitted by the biennale as a full-fledged “national pavilion” until China objected and it was demoted to a collaborate exhibition after 2001. The island’s contested identity was often the backdrop of the earlier group exhibitions before TFAM switched to the solo exhibition format in 2015, as some of the titles remind us: “The Spectre of Freedom” (2005), “Foreign Affairs” (2019) and “This is not a Taiwan Pavilion” (2013). South Korea You have to hand it to the South Koreans. In a year when the number of Asian exhibitions at the Venice Biennale is significantly reduced from the 2019 level because of the pandemic and related logistical nightmares, the country’s artists are seen everywhere across town. There are three solo collateral events dedicated to artists Ha Chong-Hyun, Chun Kwang-young and Lee Kun-yong; two group shows that feature Park Seo-bo and Haegue Yang; plus a touring exhibition organised by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation. Painter with autism given chance to showcase talent at a Beijing bookstore And then there’s “Gyre”, artist Kim Yun-chul’s much-talked-about exhibition at the Korean pavilion. The title, borrowed from the William Butler Yeats’ poem The Second Coming , reflects a state of instability and unease. The centrepiece is Chroma V , a huge, slowly gyrating snakelike coil suspended in the middle of the pavilion. It is made of motorised acrylic panels that change colour according to a flexing motion controlled by a giant cosmic particle detector installed in another room. These and other hi-tech installations are astonishingly organic, as if an autonomous intelligence completely independent of human thought has acquired a life of its own. The pulsing particles receptor (called Argos – The Swollen Suns) is also a symbol of a supernova that heralds the death of a star, as if saying “no power is absolute and permanent”.