ART SG

Art SG is four days of contemporary art at Marina Bay Sands, and the first serious art fair Southeast Asia has had. It also opens the art year, being the first fair of consequence anywhere on the calendar.

Around a hundred galleries from thirty countries. Some forty thousand people through the doors.

The Bet

The fair launched in January 2023 and was the largest art event the region had seen in a decade.

It was a wager on Singapore. The city has money, English, rule of law and a position in the middle of everything, and what it lacked was a market. Magnus Renfrew, who had built the Hong Kong fair that Art Basel later bought, set out to give it one. UBS backed it from the start.

And MCH Group, which owns Art Basel, took a fifteen per cent stake in Art SG a year before the first edition opened.

That last fact is worth sitting with. The parent company of Art Basel Hong Kong, which runs in March, holds a share of the fair that runs in January.

The Sectors

The floor divides into three, and the divisions are the fair’s argument about itself.

Galleries is the main body: established international and regional names showing their strongest work.

Focus is for curatorial risk, weighted toward digital and new media and toward artists in the middle of their careers rather than at the top of them.

Futures is the interesting one. It is open only to galleries less than ten years old, showing work made in the previous eighteen months that has not been exhibited anywhere before. There is a prize attached to it now. A visitor who wants to see what has not yet been decided goes there first.

What to Know

The fair anchors Singapore Art Week, which runs about ten days across the city. The fair is four of them, and the rest deserves more time than most visitors give it.

There is a preview and vernissage the evening before the public opening. That is where the selling happens.

Singapore in January is hot and wet. The city is built to be walked indoors and the art week is not.

The fair has grown smaller rather than larger since it opened, which is not the same as failing. A hundred galleries that sell is a better fair than a hundred and sixty that do not.

The mistake is treating it as a stop on the way to Hong Kong in March. The regional work here is shown nowhere else, and it is the reason to come.

The Court

Art SG is not the Court’s own. Preview passes, introductions to particular galleries and places at the collectors’ dinners are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward.