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As ART SG returns to Singapore’s iconic Marina Bay Sands hotel and convention center this week for its third edition, the art fair has multiple challenges to deal with.
The number of galleries has shrunk again. There were 150 galleries in its first edition, in 2023; last year, there were 114 exhibitors, and this year there are 106. Large international galleries such as Pace, Perrotin, David Zwirner, and Almine Rech participated in the inaugural edition, but they have once again decided not to return.
Meanwhile, the art market has grown increasingly fragmented over the last year, according to top experts, with some eight-figure works failing to sell during the November sales and a crash in prices for works by contemporary artists. And, while Singapore’s economy grew more quickly than expected for the third quarter of 2024 at 5.4 percent, the election of former President Donald Trump to a second term in the US has added uncertainty and the country’s GDP growth is now expected to slow to 1 to 3 percent next year.
But there is one possible positive: the number of galleries with locations in Singapore participating in ART SG has grown to 21, with a total of 32 galleries from Southeast Asia, a sign of energy in both the art scene of this city-state and the region more broadly.
“We’re pleased that we’ve got a number of galleries that are coming back after a hiatus, which is encouraging, I think, and it’s also a testament to sort of people’s ongoing belief and curiosity in the Southeast Asia market,” Magnus Renfrew, cofounder of ART SG and the Art Assembly, told ARTnews. “I think that the situation for Singapore is really getting stronger and stronger in terms of its relevance. There’s a lot of activity within the region, but also there’s a lot of activity in Singapore itself.”
Renfrew highlighted Tang Contemporary Art, which opened a new space in Singapore last year as its eighth location. Singapore Art Week, he pointed out, has also grown its schedule of activities in a bid to further expand the city’s programming outside the Marina Bay Sands exhibition center and draw attention to the various galleries and arts institutions across the island nation. The Singapore-based nonprofit Tanoto Art Foundation also launched this week with a one-day symposium on Tuesday.
The amount of wealth in Singapore has grown, too, with the number of single family offices shooting past 2,000 by the end of 2024, an increase of 43 percent compared to the same time the previous year. “For those to be viable,” Renfrew said of SFOs, “you really need to have around 40 million US dollars of assets under management, minimum … And most of them are many times that.”
Goodman Gallery, of Cape Town, South Africa, is returning for its third year. Owner Liza Essers told ARTnews that the fair enabled her to engage with loyal supporters in Singapore, as well as those from other elsewhere. “For instance, we’ve had great connections in Taiwan, where William Kentridge recently showcased his Royal Academy touring exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum Gallery,” she siad. “We also have longstanding collectors in Melbourne and Sydney, alongside deep institutional relationships throughout the region.”
“The Asian market is still key for us particularly as there’s a keen appetite for contemporary African art in the region,” Essers said, highlighting nonprofit institutions like Andreas Teoh’s The Institutum, which last year presented the exhibition “Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics.” That show, curated by Zoé Whitley, a curator and the director of London’s Chisenhale Gallery, featured many artists represented by Goodman, such as El Anatsui and Kapwani Kiwanga.
Other gallerists are returning to the ART SG with a hopeful mindset in the midst of an expansion mode. “I think there’s still collectors out there,” Daphne King-Yao of the Hong Kong–based Alisan Fine Arts told ARTnews, noting that she had just celebrated the one-year anniversary of her location in New York and opened a new, 10,000-square-foot venue in Tin Wan.
Alisan is bringing work at more affordable price points, according to King-Yao. “Our things are not—we’re not talking about millions of dollars in our in terms of our sales. That’s not where our artwork is. It’s still, I think, affordable within a range of you know what people are collecting.”
King-Yao said that she has read about or spoken to other galleries who also plan on offering a lower tier price point in reaction to sensitivity from buyers. “People are going to think twice,” she said. “I’ve heard from other galleries and other dealers that they’re more cautious in what they’re bringing.”
The latest Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting found that Singapore had the highest proportion of new collectors of any region, with 42 percent collecting for fewer than six years. Almost all of the respondents from Singapore (97 percent) expressed optimism about the global market, and 52 percent of the collectors the report surveyed planned to purchase more art last year. The city’s share of global art exports grew from 1 percent in 2019 to 5 percent in 2023. And, in the wider region, Sotheby’s launched its multi-use Maison space in Hong Kong’s business district in July last year, and Christie’s opened its 50,000 square foot, three-story space in the city soon afterward. The most recent joint report by Art Basel and UBS also highlighted the fact that China has led the world in art spending over the last 18 months.
Still, not everyone is buying the rosy picture.
“Westerners are all trying to do business here, right? They all seem to think that the money is here,” longtime gallerist and art collector Richard Koh told ARTnews. “But if you look at the art scene, the art sales, it is actually not that encouraging. In fact, personally, I think we haven’t seen the worst yet.”
Koh pointed to the activity at least year’s auctions in Hong Kong and Shanghai, in which estimates were much lower compared to several years prior, resulting in losses. “From a collector’s point of view, it’s good that prices are coming back down to earth,” he said. “It was just unreal—purely a game for the 1 percent, and it has nothing to do with the art market.”
In Koh’s view, seasoned collectors in Asia have started buying again, though more selectively, and the Covid-era speculators have left the scene. There is a younger generation of collectors, he said, but he doesn’t think they are as obsessive about collecting.
“They are not connoisseurs,” he said. “They just buy what they like. It’s part of their lifestyle. People buy art as part of a portfolio of assets. I think it’s one of the worst assets you can have, because it’s totally not liquid.”
The fair this year will also have 10 galleries with locations in Shanghai and Beijing, as well as eight with spaces in Hong Kong. With the US inauguration just a week away and Trump having already proposed major tariffs on China, many are looking to ART SG as an early signal for the health of the region’s art market amid potential economic destabilization. Measuring that will be difficult, as the practice of buying and selling art at fairs in Asia is widely understood to be very different compared to art fairs in the US and Europe.
“There’s real business being done in the in the weeks and months following the fair, as a result of conversations that have started at the fair in Singapore, and we had a number of galleries express that to us this year as well,” Renfrew said.