Lost in the galleries at Art Stage Singapore

Natty dread rides again closer to the equator, but first off a few corrections to the article that came out in the main section last Jan. 27 on Art Stage Singapore. Communications director surname is Chan and not Cruz, unless Ms. Regina is to marry into the common Filipino name soon. The art fair is in its third not fourth edition, unless feng shui experts insist that the year of planning or dry run be included in the count. And the middle name of one of the Art Informal artists represented at the fair is Recheta not Rachete, the better for Tatong Torres not to go after us with a machete.

What a fair it was those three or four days in January, the Filipino word for the experience is nakakalula, a dizzying overload of art and related delights that one almost never knew when or where to stop or start, you just had to pace yourself and go the distance, peruse the Picassos and Chagalls and Warhols and Bob Dylans, as well a rich repast of contemporary Southeast Asian art that included a stunning Indonesian platform featuring a metalwork etching by Pintor Sirait of his ancestors, the region a specialty anyway of the fair and to which galleries, artists, collectors, critics and journalists flock to make the island state, as they say in the brochures, a sort of arts hub, but don’t quote me on that.

There are few things more edifying or more humanizing than being surrounded by works of art, and Art Stage Singapore does exactly that, i.e., make one feel as if all the world’s a stage of art, and the viewers mere minions of this august company. The renowned French collector Sylvain Levy said it best in an interview at the fair: a collector must always remain humble, and in a matrix where everything is commodified the artistic value must be fully appreciated and understood, and what we are buying when purchasing art is not so much the work as “moments of happiness.”

Festival director Lorenzo Rudolf agreed with Levy that collectors almost never buy at auctions, because the value of an art piece can go up and it can go down, and unless the work is one off that can only be found in the harsh environment of open bidding, the average collector — meaning not the Terence Stamp type — usually opts to frequent art fairs and takes time to think over a potential purchase, and just goes back after the fair or through wire transfer make the desired transaction.

Such basics can only begin to be grasped when at the fair itself, where Art Stage brought in more than a hundred galleries the world over, four of them from the Philippines: Silverlens, The Drawing Room, Finale Art File and Art Informal. There were even Filipino artists under the auspices of foreign galleries, such as Fil-Am performance artist Bea Camacho of Korean Wooson Gallery, whose installation video features the artist insinuating herself back into something akin to an embroidered cocoon. She fits the bill perfectly, commuting between New York and Manila throughout the year, the yin/yang of east and west.

There’s Leslie de Chavez of Korea’s Arario, his large-scale works bordering on social realism in league with the likes of Antipas Delotavo and Egay Talusan, a pair of oils on canvas sold for about 30,000 Singapore dollars each. De Chavez had spent time in art residency in Seoul, which explains his affiliation with the gallery.

Then there’s local darling Ronald Ventura courtesy of the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI), his slew of imposing glass skulls a fable in themselves, it seems like he will be spending the rest of his life trying to live up to that record-breaking auction.

A bus or train ride away from Marina Bay Sands, site of Art Stage, is the Gillman Barracks, a former military barracks converted into a nascent community of art galleries, two of which have been imported from the Philippines: Silverlens and The Drawing Room. The sprawling grounds remind one of the Subic Bay residential layout, with its clean roads, rolling terrain, fresh breeze and great view of a rising moon. On one of the last nights of the fair a delegation of visiting journalists was bussed into the barracks, and there was the atypically hospitable Filipino reception of beer wine and buffet.

At the Silverlens barracks was the group show “Ley Hunting” put together by Gary Ross-Pastrana, which included a number of 13 Artist awardees such as Christina Dy, Mariano Ching, Wawi Navarozza, and Cos Zicarelli, a wildly diverse assembly of works only a gallery like Silvelens is capable of. According to one of the participating artists Luis Lorenzana, “ley hunting” refers to the old UFO lines in an attempt to graph or link together the altogether eclectic gathering of artists. Point woman Neli Go has been Singapore-based since last August.

A short walk up the hilly road the barracks of The Drawing Room beckons, and in it the small scale barong-barongs as improvised doll houses and lean-tos by the Australia-based Filipino couple Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, the show “Prototypes” a parable of Filipino resilience and indomitable spirit in a foreign land.

Because no matter how many Filipinos there are in places like Singapore, it cannot be gainsaid that it is still a foreign country. Such that the sense of otherness comes — or does not come — with the territory.

The occasional preoccupation with art market reports is mere indication of the market-driven environment in the island state, but art fairs in themselves must never lose sight of the artist. Of course artists too have to make a sale and eat, and for this we have to thank the museums and critics, the galleries and collectors, even Terence Stamp.

In an event the magnitude of Art Stage Singapore, perhaps the only way for the artist to survive is to disappear into the gallery. There in the margins of art lies an altogether different matrix where art can again be possible for reinvention.