Singapore Biennale has come a long way by staying close to home

As art biennales go, Singapore was a latecomer. While large-scale international contemporary art exhibitions started popping up throughout Asia in the 1990s – Taipei (1992), Gwangju (1995), Shanghai (1996) and Busan (1998) – the Lion City didn’t have its version until 2006, the year it hosted the International Monetary Fund-World Bank Group annual meetings.

A decade on, the Singapore Biennale – its fifth edition opens on October 27 and will run until February 26, 2017 – has done much to catch up. Hong Kong may play host to international art galleries, fairs and auctions, but Singapore is streets ahead when it comes to staging big, non-commercial contemporary visual arts events that have a strong regional focus.

The Singapore Biennale is now a fixture on the Asian contemporary arts calendar, alongside the older biennial exhibitions and the Yokohama Triennale and Asia Pacific Triennial (Queensland, Australia).

This year, Filipinos Ryan Villamael and Dex Fernandez, China’s Qiu Zhijie and Pala Pothupitiya from Sri Lanka are among the 60 artists from 19 countries and territories taking part in the four-month-long exhibition, titled “An Atlas of Mirrors”. It is curated by Dr Susie Lingham who, until earlier this year, was director of the Singapore Art Museum.

Over the past decade the biennale has undergone a gradual shift in focus towards the Southeast Asian region, which makes sense given Singapore’s cultural and geographical positioning.

“We nestled it between East Asia and South Asia,” says Lingham, creative director of this year’s exhibition. “I’m trying to emphasise the kind of complexities of the world we live in now.”

When she was with the Singapore Art Museum, one of her aims was to make Southeast Asian artists household names. “You need to be concerted about that. You need to give the artist your support. Coming from this part of the world, we don’t have a lot of artists who believe in their own worth. But it’s a long haul,” she says.