In January, the Singapore art scene received
a shock to the system. Eight days before it was due to start, Art Stage
Singapore, the city state’s premier annual art fair and the anchor event of
Singapore Art Week, was abruptly cancelled. Citing the “very difficult market
situation in Singapore as well as unequal competition,” Art Stage’s President Lorenzo
Rudolf pulled the plug, noting that while the fair had brought over 500
galleries to Singapore over the previous eight years, relatively few returned
due to the lack of local sales.
An archetypal Singapore can-do spirit
immediately swung into motion including a Facebook page set up by Plural Art
Mag that helped galleries find alternative exhibition spaces while non-profit
entity Art Outreach, with the support of various government agencies and the
Marina Bay Sands (MBS), set up a pop-up event — at the MBS’s exhibition space
now abandoned by the fair — which brought together 14 galleries that had intended
to show at Art Stage.
Art market participants noted that the
community’s ability to respond on short notice attests to the strength of the
visual arts ecosystem. But with the dust now settled, many in the art sector say
the withdrawal of Art Stage after eight years raises fundamental questions that
need to be addressed.
“The negative signal of Art Stage’s
sudden departure turned into euphoria for a successful Art Week without Art
Stage, but the question remains as to what’s next,” says Richard Koh, of Richard
Koh Fine Art.
Fair
Economics
The Singapore art market has been a
tough nut to crack for art fairs, several of which have tried and failed over
the last 10 years. After a strong start, Art Stage saw the number of
participating galleries steadily dwindle from a high of 170 in 2016 to just 84
in 2018. Before the plug was pulled, only 45 galleries had reportedly registered
for this year’s edition. Other fairs like the Singapore Contemporary Art Show,
the Milan Image Art & Design Fair, and the Singapore Art Fair, have come
and gone, while having run two editions a year for four years, the Affordable
Art Fair Singapore cut back to one in 2018.
“The underlying economic reality is that
it’s not easy for a gallery here to fork out S$50,000 for a booth at an art
fair. The price points for the artworks are often not high enough to justify
such expense,” says Jasdeep Sandhu, founder of Gajah Gallery, which
participated in the first eight Art Stage fairs, but had not planned to
participate in this year.
Art Stage Singapore, which has now been
placed under provisional liquidation, was charging S$67,500 for a 90 sq. m
booth and S$26,250 for a 35 sq. m booth, according to the fair’s application
form. By comparison, the inaugural boutique fair S.E.A. Focus, which was organised
by STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery and supported by several government
agencies, offered 35 sq. m booths for only about S$6,300.
Sandhu points out that with more
affordable booths, S.E.A. Focus addressed one of the major issues the Singapore
art market currently faces as, “the price of art in Southeast Asia is not high
enough to sustain an expensive fair,” but adds the boutique fair may need to
consider a new location and a slightly larger format if it is to return in
2020.
The new boutique fair, which was located
at Gillman Barracks in the hope of attracting visitors to the somewhat isolated
art enclave, had more than 10,500 visitors over the five days, a far cry from
the 26,500 visitors that attended Art Stage Singapore last year but comparing
quite favourably with the 12,000 visitors that attended the well-established
Affordable Art Fair in 2018.
“There wasn’t a big crowd, but there was
quality attendance, I mean people that ask good questions and are truly
interested in the art,” says Guillaume Levy-Lambert, co-founder of Art Porters
Gallery, which nearly sold out works offered at the stand, which ranged from S$880 to $10,000. “We also take the view
that participating in a fair is a long-term outreach. It takes time to grow a
collector base; it’s not just about sales, but also about the connections you
make that will develop over time,” Levy-Lambert adds.
New
Entrant
Art market professionals are now pinning
their hopes on Art SG to burnish Singapore’s profile as a regional art hub.
The new fair is due to launch on
November 1 at MBS and is run by several of the people who developed Art HK before
it was sold to Art Basel in 2013. One of the co-founders, Magnus Renfrew is
also running the new Taipei Dangdai fair that took place in January.
Renfrew says Art SG will be “realistic
in terms of scale,” starting with about 80 booths, and points out it is positioned
to create a hub fair for Southeast Asia: “We’re not trying to replicate Art
Basel in Hong Kong. But right across Asia now, there are opportunities for
regional fairs. I believe galleries from across Asia and beyond would like to
have a high quality and selectively-determined art fair in Singapore that can
provide them with the opportunity to connect with new collectors from the
region as well as their existing collectors.”
Having recently participated in the
Taipei Dangdai fair, Sandhu says he is confident Art SG organizers have the
“experience and capacity” to attract a strong roster of galleries. But he
stresses that to be successful the new fair will need to bring in collectors
from across the region.
Jeffrey Say, Programme Leader of MA
Asian Art Histories at LASALLE College of the Arts, says Art SG will need to
learn from the lessons of art fairs not been able to sustain themselves: “It
needs to do market research to be acquainted with the demands of the Singapore
market. It needs to do its best to attract blue-chip international galleries,
but it will also need to maintain good relations with the local galleries.
While the focus on Asia or Southeast Asia is well-intentioned, you won’t
attract international buyers. It needs to have strong programming, and fringe
activities.”
Say also notes that while art fairs may
be an important part of Singapore’s art ecosystem, they are just one component
of it: “We need more ground-up initiatives, and more private benefactors and
philanthropists to come forward to support these initiatives. We need an
independent art scene and art fringe, and not only state-sponsored activities.
We used to have a thriving independent scene in the 1990s and the first half of
the 2000s, but most went under because of a lack of funding. And, of course,
there is an urgent need to educate and nurture an art audience because even if
you have the best shows, if you have no audience, all your effort would have
been in vain.”
In
state of flux
The difficulties faced by fairs is
indicative of the state of the wider commercial art sector, which has been in flux
in recent years. The top-down experiment of developing the art district at
Gillman Barracks has had only mixed success. Seven years after its opening
(2012), only five of the initial 13 galleries remain. Last November, Element
Art Space, which had moved from Raffles Hotel Arcade to Gillman in 2017, closed
its gallery there to focus on expanding its art advisory and consultancy
services from a new location, noting in an email to gallery clients, “a clear
need for services in South East Asia based upon careful scholarship, utmost discretion
and unbiased, objective advice.” Last
month (March), Pearl Lam Galleries was the latest to defect from the precinct
moving its permanent space to a new gallery in Dempsey Hill, Singapore’s more
vibrant lifestyle and dining hub. While it refused to comment on the reasons
behind the move, it stated it was intend “to embark on a new chapter that will
bring a fresh approach to its engagement with the art market in Singapore.”
One major sustainability issue for art
galleries in Singapore is the high overhead costs (rental and staff) when
compared to the average price of local art in the region. As Koh remarks, “Working
and nurturing young artists is really not easy because of the lower price
points we can sell their work at; and Singapore is not exactly a cheap place to
run a gallery.”
Sandhu similarly points out “The
overhead cost in relation to the average price of the art being sold in the
region is still a bit disproportionate,” adding “That said, while 15 years ago
that problem was acute, we’ve made a lots of progress. Back then Singapore
artists were selling for around S$1,500-3,000, today there is a good number of
artists selling above S$30,000. While S$3,000 to S$5,000 is a common price for
a young artist, it’s not enough to sustain him, but it has progressed a lot.”
Another issue often raised by gallery
owners is the still-small size of the collector base, even though it has grown
and includes many with high disposable incomes as Levy-Lambert notes: “It’s
true that it’s a small collector base, but people have spending power, and even
in a new market there are always opportunities.” But he also points out, “it’s
not easy, and as a commercial gallery, you really need to work at it to bring
foot traffic in. It’s still very much a pioneer effort because there isn’t a
culture here to go ‘crawl some galleries’ over the weekend. Outside of opening
night — when people come not always for the right reasons — it’s still very
hard to get people in.”
Likewise, Marie-Pierre Mol, co-founder
of Intersections Gallery says, “I don’t think that the collector base is too small,
but that the local actors have to learn to deal properly with the local
collectors. I don’t have miracle solutions but believe that it will require
patience, focus and perseverance.”
Sandhu is optimistic for the medium term
outlook: “I think we are at a point of the cycle where things are starting to
stabilize. Most of the galleries that are here (in Singapore) now will probably
still be here in the next three years. It’s important to remember that there
are nine to 12 pretty serious galleries in Singapore when we only have a
population of 5 million. By comparison, I would say Indonesia and Malaysia have
maybe two to three very serious galleries each, so the ratio of professional
galleries to the local collector base is actually very high here.”
Gallerist Richard Koh is also feeling positive
and recently opened a permanent space in Gillman Barracks, believing in the
power of galleries clustering and the promotional benefits that can be derived
if they work together. “I see the market recalibrating because the client base
in changing. More people from the region are collecting based on interest and
passion, when in the early days it was all about investing in the art. I also
see more younger people starting to collect,” he says.
A version of this article was first published in Singapore Business Review