Filipino Contemporary art has been selling very well at auction in Hong Kong and Singapore, so it shouldn’t be surprising that Manila is getting its first auction house. The new venture ran a trial sale recently and is now embarking on its first auction on July 24th which will combine Contemporary art with jewelry, decorative objects and collectible accessories, according to the Manila Bulletin:

Salcedo Auctions’ (Three Salcedo Place, Salcedo Village, Makati City) daring venture may even be timely considering the subtle, barely noticeable but ground-breaking shifts that the local art market is experiencing at present.  According to Karen Kua-Lerma, the president of Salcedo Auctions, the art market—at least in Metro Manila—seems to be changing locales anew with regards to its center. Continue Reading

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.” Continue Reading

Singapore’s Business Times profiles a local gallery that specializes in Filipino art and the advantages they have gained during the Asian Art bust. But as buying activity and prices return to Asian art, especially emerging art, the paper asks if the Philippines can be The Next Big Thing?

Utterly Art is an obscure art space dedicated to an even more unlikely kind of art – its tiny 1,200 sq ft space houses the most Filipino art in the world outside the Philippines. Last year, gallery owner Pwee Keng Hock and his business partner Kenneth Tan had 18 shows just on Filipino art alone. This year, they are poised to end with 16 or 17 Filipino shows. […] With 200 exhibitions under their belt since they opened in 2001, the gallery has always shown an uncanny eye for unknown but talented artists, first in Singapore, and later in the region, before finally specialising in art from the Philippines. By focusing on ’emerging’ artists long before the word became popular, Utterly Art established itself as a venue for affordable and original art.  […] Mr Pwee and Mr Tan knew they were making a lot less money than those who concentrated on huge canvases from China and India, and later Indonesia. But they also knew the exploding market wasn’t tenable. So when the bubble burst, Utterly Art was affected, but nowhere near the brutal blow big galleries had to bear. In fact the bubble proved to be a blessing of sorts for Filipino art. Collectors, even galleries turned to cheaper art. Suddenly, work from the Philippines earned strong interest.

Betting on Filipino art proved to be prescient. The island nation with its Catholic iconography has work that is recognizable and appealing to Europeans:Continue Reading