Singapore turning into arts hub while Hong Kong still stuck in mud
Lion City’s government has made a big push to grow its arts infrastructure and market. While everything is falling into place, artists worry about censorship and galleries wonder if sales have hit a ceiling
Twice a year, Mark Saunderson takes over several floors of a Hong Kong hotel to host the Asia Contemporary Art Show. Guest rooms are leased out to galleries for pop-up sales rooms and, in its fourth year, it remains a profitable model. The space is limiting, though, and Saunderson would like to move to Wan Chai’s convention centre, but the venue is notoriously hard to book.
So he turned to Singapore for growth. This year he launched the inaugural Singapore Contemporary Art Show, which opened on January 21 at the Suntec Convention and Exhibition Centre. The 6,000 square metre hall is a world-class venue with a high ceiling and few obstructive columns, allowing for large works, such as the metres-long abstract panels by Indonesian artist Dedy Sufriadi.
“This is a grown-up art fair,” Saunderson says proudly as he roams a venue roughly double the size of the one in Hong Kong. His team has locked in a three-year booking at Suntec with the option of bumping up to 11,000 square metres. “Over time, Singapore will mature into a slightly more senior position than the Hong Kong shows,” he predicts. That could be an understatement: the first Singapore fair attracted 16,000 visitors over four days, compared with the 9,000 who attended his last Hong Kong show at the Conrad hotel.
“The government here has a specific aspiration for Singapore and nurtures it. We met the National Arts Council very early on. They’re the ones who said, ‘you must come and meet the Suntec people’. That kind of cooperation made it a bit easier for us,” he adds.
This is a typical example of how Singapore’s proactive government has made the city more attractive to some businesses than Hong Kong’s laissez-faire market. The hyperactivity of January’s Singapore Art Week – which includes the Singapore Contemporary Art Show, the flagship Art Stage Singapore, regional art awards and numerous large exhibitions – is the fruit of one of the world’s most focused national cultural policies.
