Ah, I miss the days when Sotheby's was actually auctioning in Singapore and previews gave you the feeling of walking into a museum. I went to their Singapore preview today but there just weren't that many pictures, beyond a handful of old South East Asian Masters and an entire wall of gliterring jewels. The Southeast Asian contemporary section only displayed six or seven paintings, including two by Masriadi, which was very disappointing. I had hoped to get a closer look at the unusual Putu Sutawijaya (lot 12), which at last doesn’t have men circling in the sky. I must have seen about 60 of those which was getting tiring. But his work ‘
I Release and I Hope’ has arms outstretched in the sky under a flock of birds. While the composition is very horizontal, the grey and black outlines of the arms contrast nicely with the pale blue of the sky. Still I got a chance to see Jimmy Ong’s Farquhar Descends Forbidden Hill, a long charcoal on paper, which had already caught my eye in the catalogue. It’s a beautiful, peaceful landscape of what Singapore might have looked like when Farquhar first arrived. It’s a nice departure from the Singaporean artist’s erotic drawings, and shows how technically skilled he is.
