Artforum’s Kate Sutton wandered through Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands for the latest edition of Art Stage Singapore:

The fair itself features a heady mix of smaller galleries from Southeast Asia and a smattering of those Westerners who have opened second or third spaces in Hong Kong, Beijing, or Singapore. “I participated the first two years, then skipped last year,” dealer Kashya Hildebrand confessed. “I came back because I figured things could get pretty fun now that Art Basel Hong Kong has given all these Asian galleries the boot. Collectors missing their Asian art fix know they can come here.” All that and more: Berlin/Seoul/Beijing–based Michael Schultz Gallery made headlines offering a flashy $11.5 million Gerhard Richter painting, with another Richter reported as sold for a more palatable €580,000. […]

ArtStage founder and director Lorenzo Rudolf (who helmed Art Basel in the pre-Keller-era of 1991–2000) keeps the fair from feeling too corporate through the use of ingeniously deployed “Platforms,” nation- or region-specific exhibitions selected from the offerings at the fair by some of Asia’s most celebrated curators, including Mori Art Museum’s Mami Kataoka (Japan); Kim Sung Won (Korea); Charles Merewether (Central Asia); and artist Bose Krishnamachari, who’s responsible for creating Kochi, India’s first biennial. The mixture of curatorial statements and price tags seemed to take; Continua sold Qiu Zhijie’s The Politics of Laughing for $80,000, while Sundaram Tagore delighted in the $66,000 sale of Jane Lee’s 50 Faces. (Lee’s show continues at the gallery’s Gillman Barracks outpost.) Shakshi Gupta’s intricately-carved-and-feathered totem also found a home via Platforms.

all the world’s a stage (Artforum)