What’s new in Singapore?

Singapore has a sound basis for existence on the art market’s geopolitical map. A genuine melting pot at the end of the Malay Peninsula, the city-state is home to a wide range of different cultures, thousands of artists and generous number of billionaires. In fact, Singapore may be thought of as the Switzerland of Asia… with a particular focus on culture as its key attraction. Since the Renaissance City Plans (RCPs) launched in 2000 and the major government investments that they prompted, museums and galleries have flourished in the city and the auction houses Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Borobudur have all opened outlets there. And… to facilitate the process of private transactions… the city has another major advantage (like Geneva): a free port zone with top-security storage facilities.

The highlight of Singapore’s annual art calendar has just ended: the sixth edition of Art Stage, the Contemporary art fair launched by Lorenzo Rudolf (former Director of Art Basel) in 2010. This major fair attracts more than 50,000 visitors each year, a number that is indeed well below that of other major international fairs (over 70,000 for the FIAC in Paris and nearly 100,000 for the Art Basel, Basel), but it’s very good for this part of the globe (the largest Asian fair, Art Basel Hong Kong, attracts 60,000 visitors).

In 2016, Art Stage expanded its exhibitor’s list with 170 galleries at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Center compared with less than 160 two years ago. The fair’s primary objective has remained unchanged since the outset, i.e. to act as a platform for Asian artists. Thus, as in previous years, 75% of the exhibitors were Asian-based galleries: the Singaporean galleries rubbed shoulders with galleries from Bangkok, Taiwan, Seoul, Mumbai, Jakarta, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. From a commercial standpoint, this Asian bias is logical as experience has proved that Asian buyers prefer purchasing works by their fellow countrymen: Chinese artists sell best in China; Japanese artists sell best in Japan, etc.. Indeed, the national preference may be found throughout the world, including among French collectors, as collectors naturally have a more immediate interest in the history and culture in which they grew up, before acquiring an interest in other creative languages and other cultures.

There were few galleries from New York, London or Paris and some regular Western exhibitors were conspicuous by their absence this year: Emmanuel Perrotin, Edouard Malingre, and more modestly, Paris-Beijing Art Gallery. Fortunately, a number of other important international galleries remained faithful to the fair like White Cube, based in London and Hong Kong.

As part of the fair’s ongoing commitment to exploring the role of Contemporary art in the region, this year, Art Stage Singapore added a new forum (Southeast Asia Forum) to discuss opportunities for art and culture in urban environments (entitled Sismographe : Sentiment de la Ville – Art dans l’Âge Urbain). The talks primarily focused on how Asia can integrate Contemporary art into its future urban development. Several artists, including Sherman ONG (Singaporean), Norberto Roldan (Filipino) Aliansyah Caniago (Indonesian) offered their ideas and explained their current projects, and there were contributions from a number of important art & architecture figures such as Jean de Loisy (director of Paris’s Palais de Tokyo), architect Rem Koolhaas and auctioneer Simon de Pury. So Art Stage is still mobilising the art world and it remains an important cultural catalyst for the entire region.

Meanwhile, outside the fair’s boundaries, the city was a-buzz with nearly a hundred different artistic events, many of which occupied new cultural centres whose activity is admittedly far from overwhelming the rest of the year, despite the substantial works that have been carried out. In the Gillman Barracks district (former British Army barracks in the 1930s converted into galleries and artists’ residences), the week provided an opportunity to boost an otherwise underwhelming level of business. The heavy investments in the neighbourhood and the gambles taken by foreign galleries ​​like Arndt, Shanghart, Mizuma, Fost or Pearl Lam have not yet paid off. In fact, the Gillman Barracks pole has not yet become the arty hub that its planners envisaged and it remains somewhat deserted by visitors most of the year round. It could be that Singapore’s attraction as a new cultural city has been overestimated. In any case, the city’s secondary art market has slowed substantially with auction companies posting sharp declines in turnover last year (from $35.9 million in 2014 to just $17.9 million in 2015). The city-state is now in 28th place in our global ranking of art market hubs by Fine Art auction turnover.