LONDON — Nowness, the creative video platform founded by Dazed Media and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and now owned by China’s Meta Media, revealed that its Asia edition this year will undergo drastic changes to expand its presence in the Asia Pacific region.
As a key part of that ambition, it will host an awards ceremony honoring some of the best emerging Asian artists in moving-image culture, and add a print edition, called Nowness Asia Paper, published in collaboration with Hong Kong’s City Magazine.
Following a cocktail reception and screening in Hong Kong last week, attended by Meta Media founder Thomas Shao, photographer Wing Shya, and video director Yuen Hsieh, Nowness Asia, which was first introduced in 2020 and is based in Hong Kong, later this month will team up with ArtReview Asia for an event honoring the work of the late American artist Chris Burden at the second edition of the international art fair Art SG in Singapore.
The event in Hong Kong showcased several unreleased original productions, featuring artists and directors from Mongolia, Thailand, Indonesia, Turkey and Japan, such as a new episode of the photography and culture series “Photographers in Focus” with Turkish photographer Ci Demi, as well as the series premiere of the new food, travel and culture format “Supper Club,” which is set in Bali and featuring Indonesian cultural elites such as musician Kasimyn and Oka Rusmini.
Shahway Yeh, co-creative director of Nowness, said Nowness Asia’s film curation presents “a rich tapestry of some of the most compelling contemporary Asian aesthetics in fashion and dance, music and performance, video art and narrative, and beyond.”
Launched in 2010, Nowness was set up as an online luxury magazine by LVMH and Jefferson Hack to revitalize the then-failed e-commerce platform Eluxury.com with a focus on video content. At that time — in the heyday of print — it was considered risky.
Nowness was quick to position itself as a global media brand. A Chinese language version was set up in 2012, and now videos are available in up to 10 languages including English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian.
In 2017, LVMH sold a majority stake in Nowness to Shao, and a joint venture between Modern Media and Dazed Media was formed to ensure that Nowness could continue to showcase the best in art, design, fashion, beauty, music, food, travel and culture.
Founded in 1993, the Hong Kong-listed Meta Media, formerly known as Modern Media, is the owner of the weekly general interest magazine Modern Weekly, Lohas, Arbiter Life Magazine and Nowness. The company is also the publisher of the Chinese version of Instyle, Bloomberg Businessweek, Numéro, Ideat, The Art Newspaper, ArtReview and ArtReview Asia.
The media group played an instrumental role in creating a link between China‘s contemporary art scene and the fashion world.
As one of China’s largest fashion and luxury media corporations, the company was renamed in early 2022 to transform the company into a “virtual reality-oriented hypermedia form,” the group said at the time. The company’s first metaverse venture was the virtual reality platform Meta City, created in partnership with Baidu.
Last February, Hong Kong entrepreneur Adrian Cheng, chief executive officer of New World Development and founder of K11 Group, the retail operator behind K11 Art Mall known for initiating the “museum-retail” concept, was appointed cochairman of Meta Media.
