• Issue
  • Mar 07, 2025

Whispering Gallery: Digging for Gold

Belinda Tanoto

The Gregorian new year found artists, gallerists, curators, and advisors of all backgrounds in search of new opportunities. At Art SG, Belinda Tanoto was the name being repeated by those seeking out sales, funding, or employment prospects. The Singapore-based Indonesian art patron is behind the newly formed Tanoto Art Foundation. The daughter of billionaire oil and paper industrialist Sukanto Tanoto held a cocktail event in her multimillion-dollar glass-and-steel home, where no evidence of her rapidly growing art collection was to be seen anywhere above ground. Instead, sculptures by artists favored by institutional curators, such as Roni Horn and Mire Lee, were relegated to her vast, white-walled, and perfectly lit lower chamber, which many dealers said could easily be their dream gallery. She has enlisted young Chinese curator Xiaoyu Weng, formerly of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as her artistic director to help manage an inundation of gallerist, consultant, and artist powerpoint proposals. 


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