In late June, the four finalists for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award 2017 were announced. The artists—Li Ming, Tao Hui, Yu Ji and Robert Zhao Renhui—were chosen from a pool of over 30 nominees for their standout exhibitions and artworks produced over the last three years, and for their potential future contributions to artistic discourse....

When one is new to Jakarta, one makes the mistake of not telling the cab driver to travel via the toll roads. And so it is that while creeping through the city's tight tangled backstreets, the cab finds itself coming head-to-head with another car, both unable to give way because they are simultaneously surrounded by three dozen motorcycles.But if...

This year's Jakarta Biennale will diverge from many of the curatorial practices of its predecessors.The Jakarta Biennale, which is set to open on Saturday at Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem in South Jakarta, will this year adopt Jiwa as its artistic concept.Jiwa is a concept that is almost impossible to translate into English, but for this biennale, it...

Devised as a collaboration between artist Robert Zhao Renhui and playwright Joel Tan, the performance-lecture and exhibition The Nature Museum was a theatrical venture into museological waters. By adopting the roles of archivists of the Institute of Critical Zoologists, Zhao and Tan took their audience on an informal tour, encouraging one to drift...

Chinese collectors have so quickly become a mainstay of the art market that it is easy to forget that wealthy Southeast Asian connoisseurs started buying contemporary art decades earlier.

Dedicated to the support of emerging artists from Greater China and Southeast Asia, the biennial Hugo Boss Asia Art Award was established in 2013 and is now in its third iteration. The Award aims to contribute towards artistic and cultural exchanges in the broader historical and social contexts of Greater China and Southeast Asia. It helps in...

Boom! That's how Ornamental Hysteria, Ashley Bickerton's current exhibition at Damien Hirst's Newport Street Gallery, opens—with a box sporting an ominous red LED number-counter bolted to the wall. It's the kind of thing you can imagine the late Roger Moore briefly interrupting a moment of passion to rush and defuse during his 1970s/early-80s...

This year Art Basel Hong Kong features strong representation from galleries with bases in Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, as well as from Hong Kong and Mainland China. Out of the new galleries participating this year, ten are from Asia: A+ Contemporary, Bank, C-Space, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, imura art gallery, Jhaveri...

Wunderkammern, collections of natural specimens and rarities referred to as 'cabinets of curiosities,' first appeared in the 16th century and endure to this day. They not only sustain the pedagogical heart of most natural history museums, but also are conceptual fodder for many an artist.

Since its first event in 2011, Art Stage Singapore has swiftly become Asia's leading contemporary art fair. Every January, thousands of art dealers, collectors, curators and art lovers gather at the Marina Bay Sands hotel to discover the very best in creative talent from south-east Asia and beyond.

The National Museum of Singapore (NMS)—the country’s oldest museum—has just reopened its Glass Rotunda to great fanfare following two years of renovations. The unveiling of the rotunda coincides with the launch of two new permanent exhibits in the museum’s Singapore History Gallery: Story of the Forest (2016) by Japanese collective teamLab, an...

Indonesian artist Mangu Putra has a series of recent paintings on display at Gajah Gallery in Singapore from 25 November to 11 December 2016. Entitled Mangu Putra – Between History and Quotidian, the exhibition examines archival footage of Dutch colonisation in Bali in the early to mid 1900s. Putra uses colonial photographs published by Dutch...

One of Singapore’s oldest, continuously running private galleries, Gajah Gallery, marks its 20th anniversary this year. Gallery owner and director Singaporean Jasdeep Sandhu has for two decades been highlighting artists from throughout Southeast Asia and launching the careers of some of the region’s most celebrated talents. The...

More than two decades ago, art dealer Jasdeep Sandhu went on an extensive trip around Southeast Asia. The 50-year-old Singaporean was about to open a new art gallery and was wondering what to call it.'I was in Thailand and was about to take the train to Yangon. It was a hot afternoon and I was sweating, and right in front of me was an...

Held at the Sheraton Grand Jakarta Gandaria City Hotel, the inaugural edition of Art Stage Jakarta featured 33 international galleries from Asia, Europe and the United States, and 16 local galleries. In addition there were a number of supported events, such as talk shows, seven private VIP tours of collector’s homes, public artworks and two...

Art Stage Jakarta kicked off their inaugural event at the Sheraton Grand Jakarta in South Jakarta on Friday (05/08), showcasing a finely selected collection of artworks by Indonesian and international artists.Sticking close to its official theme Indonesia at its Best, founder and president Lorenzo Rudolf said Art Stage Jakarta aims to be a...

In its six years in Singapore, Art Stage Singapore has steadily established itself as South-east Asia's biggest commercial art attraction, attracting about 40,000 local and international visitors.In recent years, more than 100 satellite art events have popped up around the island city in conjunction with the fair. They include a dozen...

Entering its ninth year, ArtJog has grown to become a pre-eminent event in Indonesia's art calendar, bringing together an array of works by leading contemporary artists as well as launching the career of emerging names. When it returns at Jogja National Museum, Yogyakarta, on May 27, the annual art fair will showcase 97 works by 72 local...

First established in 1992 as Nippon International Contemporary Art Fair (NICAF), Art Fair Tokyo is now the biggest fair of its kind in Japan. Originally focusing on contemporary art, the fair has now branched out to showcase a variety of artistic styles and disciplines from a range of eras across its 5,000 square metre site. Taking place from 12-14...

We live in a state of the perpetual present. With the revolving door of exhibitions in more and more venues, commercial and scholarly alike, thousands of artists appear on a relatively flat plane of aesthetics. This is good for a lot of things—fair art criticism among them—but it tends to hurt our understanding, as viewers, of where the...

At a time when art galleries are downsizing or shutting down, Singapore's Gajah Gallery is marking its 20th anniversary in a new space at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. The 6,000 sq ft gallery at Artspace@Helutrans, with its 5.5m-high ceiling, allows it to display large sculptures, installations and paintings. The space is more than twice that...

Singaporean visual artist Robert Zhao Renhui is well known for his works that pair fiction and fact together in a provocative manner, which often leave the viewer unable to decipher where one ends and the other begins. His multi-disciplinary approach is centred on his observations of the natural world, but instead of documenting it, he constructs...

Art Fair Philippines (AFP), which started from humble beginnings in 2013, returns for its fourth edition February 18 through 21 at the Link, a multistory parking facility in downtown Makati’s Ayala Center. Although the fair is largely seen as a local event, its casual setting makes for a lively and dynamic show that benefits from the loyal...

Art Stage Singapore 2016 closed last weekend reporting a 20 percent drop in visitor numbers: only 40,500 visitors attended the country’s premier fair from 20 January to 24 January 2016, down from 51,000 last year. It is “the first time attendance to the fair has shrunk”, reports Straits Times. The decrease reflects unfavourable...