Two Hours in Singapore for Art SG and S.E.A. Focus

Despite the brevity of my trip, weaving through the maze of Marina Bay Sands, the mission of Art SG co-founders Magnus Renfrew and Shuyin Yang became clearly discernible: a globally facing fair that stayed true to its Southeast Asia personality.

Some years ago, Magnus Renfrew—Art SG’s co-founder—shared a frustration. When it came to art fairs, he felt art writers tended to focus too much on sales and not enough on evaluating how these large-scale exhibition formats offered excellent opportunities to discover artists.

When Renfrew launched the fair in 2023 with Shuyin Yang, who was previously director of Hong Kong fair Art Central, he highlighted two priorities to Ocula. The first was to have a strong representation of Southeast Asia’s artists—from Myanmar and Thailand to the Philippines and Indonesia—to reflect the region’s diverse cultures, languages, and art scenes. The second was building a fair whose primary concern was encouraging artistic practice over just selling objects. Its arrival in Singapore augmented the efforts of S.E.A. Focus—a smaller, more boutique fair helmed by Emi Eu, also executive director of STPI—in opening up Southeast Asia to the international art scene.

Last weekend, I visited Art SG’s third edition. My attendance was a stroke of luck, thanks to a missed flight home that bought me an afternoon at Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Centre, before jetting over to Tanjong Pagar Distripark, S.E.A. Focus’ portside home. Despite the brevity of my trip, in just one afternoon weaving between the maze of local galleries—Sullivan+Strumpf, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Richard Koh Fine Arts—and the best of their local offerings, and international blue-chips such as Lehmann Maupin, whose three stellar works by Malaysian artist Mandy El-Sayegh all sold to local private collections, Renfrew and Yang’s mission became clearly discernible: a globally facing fair that stayed true to its Southeast Asia personality.

Art Basel Hong Kong could be considered something of the region’s haughty aunt—a fair you’re compelled to engage with, but which never quite reciprocates with personal warmth. Which places Art SG as somewhat of a friendly, older cousin—a source of knowledge that politely asks you questions. By extension, S.E.A. Focus becomes the young niece with fresh perspectives on old family stories.

Art SG is the larger of the two fairs and featured 105 galleries, split into three sections across Marina Bay Sands: a section of 56 galleries, Focus (dedicated to galleries presenting solo, dual, or curated programmes) and Futures (featuring galleries in business for ten years or less).

One of the strongest booths was that of regional stalwart Ames Yavuz, offering exceptional works by globally-known artists from the region, alongside lesser-known names. A standout was the Filipino artist Elmer Borlongan, showcasing a suite of new works on paper. The series entitled ‘A Day in the Life’ (2024) uses spindly lines of ink and swathes of coffee that summon echoes of Egon Schiele. These expressive, distorted figures chronicle stories of everyday life, survival, and resilience in the Philippines. By the end of preview day, Yavuz had sold all 22 of Borlongan’s works.

Works by Alvin Ong, Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan, and Celine Lee were positioned nearby. Most striking were two large-scale painted canvases by Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak, both titled Vessel. Muted tones with lines that loop in the shape of a vessel or breast quietly dominated this booth, and had both found a home by the end of day one.

Playful connections could be drawn within booths and across the fair. Jessica Rankin‘s painted and embroidered circular moons, on view at White Cube, reflected the perfectly executed, otherworldly tones of Minoru Nomata, and similarly Miya Ando‘s lunar work on view with Sundaram Tagore.

The strident lines of Russian avantgarde artist Kazimir Malevich at Annely Juda Fine Art were echoed in a large Carol Bove sculpture at Gagosian, in turn bouncing off the bright yellow of another angular sculpture, this time by William Kentridge. The hand-painted sculpture in Goodman Gallery‘s booth is the first in a series of six titled ‘Paper Procession’ by the South African artist, with each based on small-scale paper sculptures torn from the pages of a 19th-century accounting journal from a Catholic church in Palermo, Sicily.

It was in the backroom of the South Africa-based gallery’s booth that I found the real jewels: a small sculpture by Kentridge was hiding, along with three charcoal drawings from his nine-episode series ‘Self Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’. Across the fair, galleries were careful to present large, high-value works, alongside smaller, more affordable works, reflecting a market in which new buyers are as important as experienced, big-ticket collectors.

Over at S.E.A. Focus, the fair was celebrating its seventh edition this year. Helping it do so were 40 artists from 21 exhibitors, including Cuturi Gallery, Silverlens, and of course STPI, along with many other Singaporean stalwarts.

ROH Projects stole the show with an excellent booth of work by Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho. Titled Everything is YES! BUT..., the presentation of works—priced between 3,500–40,000 USD—focused on his series of masked portraits, a time in Nugroho’s practice where we see him look into the tensions with Indonesia’s relationship and global political currents. Those at Art Basel Miami Beach in December would have caught their presentation of his early embroidered and batik work, one of the few political works to have graced the convention centre—‘not that the VIPs attending the fair seemed to be thinking much about politics,’ Miami New Times wryly observed.

With time ticking I bee-lined to Pacita Abad‘s series of prints at Silverlens (showing alongside ink-on-paper drawings by her nephew, Pio Abad). The half-dozen or so works on show were made by the late artist during her three-month residency at STPI in 2003, the year before she died. ‘The results of the STPI collaborative process overwhelmed me,’ a quote from the artist reads. ‘As the prints became extensions of my paintings, with their luminous colours textured with the added glitter, fabric, buttons, and mirrors.’

It’s initiatives such as these which have been instrumental in helping grow the arts ecosystem in Singapore, while also spurring on a regional market for mid-range works on paper. STPI’s own presentation at Art SG highlighted works from past residencies including Heman Chong, and Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, while the light captured by Ong Kim Seng in his two watercolour works from a 2004 residency, also on view at STPI’s S.E.A Focus booth, was pretty miraculous.

For those in need of some market focus, Art SG perhaps lacked the frenetic energy of its regional Hong Kong counterpart, however there were certainly enough handshakes to calm jittery watchers. On VIP day, Cardi Gallery sold Pablo Picasso‘s colour pencil drawing Buste d’Homme à la pipe (1969) for $1.2 million. Similarly, White Cube and Galerie Gmurzynska both reported six-figure sales early on, the former selling Georg Baselitz‘s Mettere mano a – anfangen (2019) for €650,000 and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones‘s Celestial Gathering (2024) for $350,000, while Gmurzynska sold Roberto Matta‘s oil painting Is thou so desired? (1957) for $150,000, and Wifredo Lam‘s 1971 painting Personnage 21/24, for $120,000, both to private collections.

Having regard to the recent Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting, Singapore is an audience worth pursuing. Of the high-net-worth individuals surveyed, Singapore represented the highest proportion of new buyers (starting their collections within the last five years) at 42 percent, while its collectors ranked amongst the highest in favouring art fairs to purchase at 25 percent.

Singapore’s institutions are hedging their bets too—the Singapore Art Museum announced the SAM Art Fund, which made 150,000 SGD available to buy works from the two fairs for the museum’s collection. Among those picked up at Art SG was Kim Yun Shin‘s stacked sculpture Add Two Add One Divide Two Divide One (2023) from Lehmann Maupin and Kapwani Kiwanga‘s ceramic and rope work Magma (2024) from Goodman Gallery. Their budget of 25,000 USD at S.E.A. Focus added 11 works to the collection, including Singaporean artist Lai Yu Tong from ShanghART‘s presentation, and Filipino artist Lui Medina from Artinformal.

With the global span of artists on show, from Singapore and Southeast Asia, to Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and all those in between, Renfrew and his team demonstrated that Art SG is a fair celebrating the dynamism and pluralism of its regional roots, while putting a global foot forward. Time will tell if there are enough mature collectors to keep up with both the fair’s ambitions and those of the galleries and artists presenting. —[O]

Main image: Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Celestial Gathering (2024). Installation view: White Cube, ART SG 2025, Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Singapore (17–19 January 2025). Courtesy ART SG.