Reframing the Region at Art SG 2025
By Kamori Osthananda
Installation view of KHAIRULDDIN WAHAB’s The Lands Below the Winds, 2024, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 500 × 500 × 160 cm, at Art SG, 2025. Courtesy Art SG.
The third edition of the Singapore art fair Art SG (January 16–19) is a simulacrum of the region’s hopes for its own artistic and commercial realization. Held in the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, the fair features dynamic presentations of galleries along with programs that allowed viewers to encounter the bifurcation of exploration and evolution taking place across the region. The diversity of 105 galleries from 30 countries and territories ensured a polyphonic experience. There is a notion that Singapore is invariably in a state of becoming—and this underscored the pace at which Art SG also took shape.
The fair was anchored by many established and internationally recognized figures. Among these were the late Korean monochrome painter Park Seo-Bo, presented by Johyun Gallery from Seoul; Anish Kapoor at globe-spanning Sundaram Tagore Gallery; Thai sculptor Pinaree Sanpitak at the booth of Singapore and Sydney’s Ames Yavuz; and Ghanaian figurative painter Amoako Boafo at global powerhouse Gagosian. Multinational Lehmann Maupin gallery was beneficiary of the Singapore Art Museum’s SAM Art SG Fund for 2025, with works by Korean sculptor and painter Kim Yun Shin being acquired for the collection.
Simultaneously, the Futures section, for young galleries established within the last decade, did not shy away from vying to spotlight emerging artists. Using Southeast Asian motifs, the photo collages of Nakrob Moonmanas, presented by the new Bangkok-based Warin Lab Contemporary, caused a stir of heightened consciousness about cultural origins. A personal favorite was the solo booth by Yumekoubou Gallery of ceramicist Furutani Kazuya, who creates traditional Shigaraki ware that are baked until broken, as the indelible marks of heritage also yield to fragmentation. Fantasy landscape painter Barry McGlashan’s solo booth by Frestonian Gallery flipped the script on art for art’s sake, as his paintings interlace paying homage to classical masters of the natural world with a cadence of his own.
NAKROB MOONMANAS, A Unicorn in the room, 2024, digital collage, gold leaf, giclee print on canvas, 71 × 63 × 6 cm. Courtesy the artist and Warin Lab Contemporary, Bangkok.
The booths in the Focus section provided galleries opportunities to showcase varied mediums and techniques of midcareer artists within more contextualized settings. The large-scale work A Hopeless Hope (2025) by the fair’s breakout star Naraphat Sakarthornsap, presented by Bangkok’s SAC Gallery, comprises a Thai garland-inspired chandelier installation assembled from ritualistic plants such as the marigold and crown flower. The solo booth laid bare the artistic choice of organic materials, which allowed for the subversion of temporality and the valorization of an unfading legacy. Marcos Kueh’s massive four-panel textile installation Expecting (2023), shown by Kuala Lumpur’s The Back Room, piqued the interest of regional viewers, and his other two works, Thread in Loving Mother’s Hands (2022) and Hunger (2022), resonated with their reinterpretations of a Chinese poem and the Hungry Ghost Festival.
Another notable mention from the section was Seoul gallery BHAK’s presentation of Bo Kim, who is known for her striking use of Korean hanji paper along with sand, which mediates the natural world and our disintegration with it in a manner that is neither linear nor rigid. Also based in Seoul, Lee & Bae’s presentation of Sangmin Lee was precise and poised; the glass engravings depicting celadon craftsmanship preserve memory in new forms, using a white ground suggestive of a clean slate. Singapore’s own Yeo Workshop organized a standout presentation of Citra Sasmita, one that felt vital to the fair’s galvanizing artistic discourse. As Sasmita explores gender-normative constructs through her use of the historical Balinese Kamasan technique of painting, she is one of many regional voices bringing depth and breadth to the fair.
The film program at Art SG 2025, “By Artists, On Artists,” was curated by Bangkok Kunsthalle founding director Stefano Rabolli Pansera and was a multimodal offering of visual sense-making. The program oscillated between the role of artists as subjects and agents, and scratched at the power dynamics in the art world. It featured Nam June Paik’s pioneering video-art experimentation Global Groove (1973), Mónica de Miranda’s exploration of the anticolonial legacy in Angola, Path to the Stars (2022), and Taking Venice (2023), a documentary about Robert Rauschenberg winning the Golden Lion in 1964, to name a few.
00 ZHANG, prototype 0037DaLC 2025.1, 2024, digital rendering. Courtesy the artist and Gazelli Art House, London/Baku.
The Digital Spotlight section paved the way for more pronounced conversations around art and technology. Entangled Others and 00 Zhang, two artists presented by Gazelli Art House from Baku and London, explored pressing questions about technological meanderings in artistic development. The artist-duo Entangled Others’ installation self-contained (2023–24) comprises an encoded dataset of organic plants systems and aquatic animals begetting new life forms, while 00 Zhang’s Prototype series (2024) muddies the lines between biomorphic and soft sculptures. In fact, 00 Zhang’s conversation with fellow artist Shavonne Wong, curator Isaiah Cheng, and program manager Clara Che Wei Peh, as part of the Art SG’s Talks program, brought to light the notion of an extended feedback loop of the human nervous system that is also present in digital interfaces. The talk concluded with the question of the blurring distinction between anthropogenic and technological artmaking and consumption.
Across the four-day event, Art SG welcomed more than 41,000 visitors. Reported sales figures topped USD 1.2 million for a 1969 Pablo Picasso painting, and works by several blue-chip postwar artists such as Georg Baselitz and Antony Gormley garnered sales in the low- to mid-six-figure range. With Singaporean collectors ranked among the highest in favoring the purchase of works at art fairs—according to Jin Yee Young, head of Art SG’s lead partner, UBS, in Singapore—the fair is anticipated to become a hallmark of, and crucial stop on, the annual art calendar each January.
Kamori Osthananda is a writer based in Bangkok.
