Time looks at the Singapore Museum’s survey of art from the Philippines and the trend that makes it a milestone:
The emergence of a new trend in Asian art cannot be inferred from a single sale, but works from other contemporary Philippine artists such as Geraldine Javier, Winner Jumalon and Benedicto Cabrera are being sold with increasing frequency and success at auctions and galleries in Hong Kong, Singapore, London and New York City. Mok Kim Chuan, the head of Southeast Asian art at Sotheby’s, calls it a nascent boom with room to run. “It took 20 years for Indonesian art to grow to where it is now in the market,” he says. “The Philippines has only just started.”
The speed at which contemporary Philippine art has swept across the Asian art world over the past year has outstripped popular knowledge of its fundamentals. What are the enduring influences on the art of this culturally complex country? What are the concerns of its pre-eminent modern artists and how have they arisen? To situate current market excitement within a wider historical framework, the Singapore Art Museum has mediated rivalries between secretive Philippine collectors, and dug into its own archives, to put together a show of 70 rarely seen works spanning more than a century of Philippine art. It is, experts agree, one of the largest and most historically rich exhibitions of Philippine art ever assembled outside the country.
From Spanish to Surreal (Time)