The Art Market Check by Melanie Gerlis

As ART SG opens its fourth edition in Singapore’s swanky Marina Bay Sands this week (22-25 January), returning visitors might notice a few differences. For a start, the older event, S.E.A. Focus, now in its eighth year, has moved into the bigger fair for the first time, bringing 16 booths of Southeast Asian contemporary art to the Convention Centre’s first level showings. “We can give them a much wider audience,” says Magnus Renfrew, co-founder of ART SG, noting that his event last year had 40,000 visitors during its four-day run.

The S.E.A. Focus section zones in on artists as agents of compassion, grouped under the theme of The Humane Agency, and includes work by the Philippines husband-and-wife duo Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, whose intricate cardboard-based compositions are increasingly in demand (price range at the fair USD 7,500-USD 40,000, STPI gallery). Other artists who feature include the rising-star Singapore film and installation practitioner Ho Tzu Nyen, whose work explores the construct of the region of Southeast Asia (neugerriemschneider gallery). Ho Tzu Nyen features too among the 20-plus artists in an offsite work that transforms the lobby of The Warehouse Hotel on the upscale Robertson Quay into an immersive, 12-day exhibition—including a curated menu—called Wan Hai Hotel: Singapore Strait (until 31 January).

Also new to ART SG this year is a dedicated sector on performance, organised by X Zhu-Nowell, executive director and chief curator of Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, who also runs the fair’s film programme. “Performance felt a natural progression for us,” Renfrew says, noting that the fair has had individual performances before as well as the more impactful large-scale works in its Platform section. Renfrew adds that live performances boost the fair’s appeal by “creating a moment of excitement and tension and it helps encourage return visits. Performance is one of those things that is dependent on having a moment and an experience that one can’t get in the same way remotely.”

He promises performances every day, including by the Singapore artist John Clang who is offering astrology-based fortune telling sessions as well as presenting a participatory installation of nine chairs based on the principles of feng shui. “As a viewer, you are supposed to go and bathe in luck,” Renfrew says, enticingly. Clang is also among the artists performing in The Warehouse Hotel takeover.

The fair’s lead partner, UBS, also gets in on the act and is screening a video of a five-hour performance by the Indonesian artist Melati Suryodarmo in its Art Studio at the fair (Level 1). The 2007 film involves the artist dressed in black and moving through a red room, carrying a glass and repeating “I love you”, also the name of the work. It is, confirms Young Jin Yee, UBS’s co-head of Global Wealth Management, Asia Pacific and country head for Singapore, her bank’s first presentation of a performance artwork.

Behind the fair’s growing ambitions are Singapore’s credentials as a wealth haven and business hub within Asia. Renfrew says that “the possibilities are significant. The catchment area that Singapore serves is huge and psychologically increasing. The world’s wealthy are choosing it as a place to open family offices and also to base themselves. In an uncertain world, Singapore has a haven status… It is uniquely placed as a neutral territory.” He cites too a recent Salesforce index which ranks Singapore as the most Artificial-Intelligence ready nation in Asia Pacific, second globally only to the United States. “Western tech companies are basing themselves here and Chinese firms see it as the leading hub outside of their own country,” Renfrew says.

Singapore’s art collecting community has grown in parallel to its influx of global wealth, notably from China and, more recently, beyond. Renfrew finds that “there’s been a real drive in terms of patronage.” This year marks the second year of its SAM ART SG Fund, launched to support acquisitions of contemporary art by the Singapore Art Museum, to the tune of SGD 150,000 (about US 117,000). Amongst the contributing collectors are Carmen Yixuan Li and Pure Yichun Chen, each originally from China and now based in Singapore. This week, ART SG revealed that the collector Pierre Lorinet, who moved to Singapore from Switzerland when chief financial officer of the commodities trader Trafigura, has upped the fund by a further SGD 100,000 (USD 78,000).

This year too is the first time that TVS, India’s leading motorbike manufacturer, has supported the fair, through Tara Venu, who runs its portfolio of creative brands, Atelier Expressions, and is based in Singapore. Their backing brings eight galleries, mostly from India, into a dedicated pavilion in the fair, organised by Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in India. “India is a big part of the [Asian] story, and has a significant NRI [Non-Resident Indian] presence in Singapore,” Renfrew says, adding that ART SG has recently appointed a VIP relations representative dedicated to the region.

Such support represents a “new way that patrons are operating here, to have a more lasting impact,” Renfrew says. They are also still buying art, and with an appetite for contemporary art that has dipped elsewhere in the world.

The latest Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025link for art market research found that the percentage of new and emerging works in high-net-worth collections had fallen to an average 33% in 2025. Among the outliers was Singapore, where new and emerging art contributed 37%, second only to Germany’s 39%. UBS’s Young Jin Lee says “we’re seeing strong interest in emerging talent, especially among female collectors”. Indeed, the collector survey found that the most active buyers (by volume) in the 10 regions analysed were women in Singapore, who had bought an average 24 pieces of fine art, decorative art or antiques in 2024, against a global average of 14.

Singapore’s art scene has not been immune though to the wider problems of macro-economic and political uncertainty that have hit the rest of the art market. ART SG’s gallery numbers are similar to last year (106)—though this is down on 2024 and includes the S.E.A. Focus fair (albeit there is plenty of overlap). “There are wider problems and galleries are having to make short term and pragmatic decisions,” Renfrew says.

Glen Ames, chief executive of the Singapore-founded Ames Yavuz gallery (which also operates in Sydney and London) says that there has been a “clear behavioural change” amongst collectors over the past few years, who are more considered. “We observe fewer spontaneous acquisitions,” he says. Nonetheless, his gallery has shown ART SG every year since inception and this week has a booth of art from across Southeast Asia, including works on paper by the Myanmar artist Po Po and sculptures by Thailand’s Pinaree Sanpitak (booth price range USD 3,000-USD 115,000). Ames finds that ART SG “has gone from strength to strength, especially in pulling high net worth collectors to Singapore for the week.” Young is of the same mind. She says: “We have seen how the fair brings together galleries, artists and audiences from around the world, while spotlighting the strength and diversity of Southeast Asian creativity.”