Southeast Asian art buyers begin look West

Southeast Asian art buyers begin look West

By Sonali Desai

SINGAPORE (Reuter): Southeast Asian art buyers are beginning to set their sights beyond regional shores and eye the Western art market as rising prosperity dissolves geographic and cultural boundaries.

Although gallery owners and auction houses still describe the level of buying of Western paintings as a trickle rather than a flood, they are upbeat about the prospects for this market given its growth in recent years.

"Southeast Asians are becoming more affluent and well traveled. It's common for them to keep homes in California or New York, so this is a natural progression, said Irene Lee, general manager of Christie's in Singapore.

In March, the London-based auction house held a three-day exhibition in Singapore of selected 19th and 20th century paintings being auctioned in New York this month.

The collection included works by Monet, Picasso, Warhol and Lichenstein, with estimated values extending well into seven digits.

"We feel that Singapore offers access to a relatively wide catch basin of potential collectors in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia," said Michael Findlay, senior director of impressionist and modern art at Christie's in New York.

It was the second time the auction house had included Singapore on a list of four cities worldwide to showcase paintings featured in its biannual sales of Impressionist and Modern art.

"There was sufficient activity after our October exhibition to warrant our coming back," Findlay said, declining to provide figures.

Bjorn Wetterling, managing director of the Wetterling Teo Gallery and head of the Singapore's Art Galleries Association, cites the Christie's exhibition as proof of the growing market for Western art in the region.

Wetterling's gallery, itself a major dealer of post-war American art, was established in 1994 in partnership with a local businessman and the backing of the Singapore government, to bring international contemporary art to Asia.

"Since I started the gallery, the market has improved a lot, but it's still a virgin market," he said, noting that the bulk of his clients tended to be Singapore-based private collectors. Part of the difficulty is that while "the brand names" are always easy to collect and recognize, not everybody has heard of a James Rosenquist or a Robert Rauschenberg, Wetterling said.

But the problem of recognition is by no means unique to this part of the world.

If anything, efforts by local galleries, backed by the Singapore government's push to establish the tiny island as a regional center for the arts, have generated a near constant buzz of activity on the domestic art scene.

The Singapore Art Museum's four-month exhibition of works from the Guggenheim Museum in New York earlier this year attracted about 55,000 visitors.

About a third of these were from outside Singapore, including one 16-year-old student who back-packed from Malaysia and lived on instant noodles for two days just to see the exhibition, a museum spokeswoman said.

She noted, however, that "big name Western" artists are only featured in one of the 10 to 15 shows the museum holds annually.

The often daunting price tags attached to Western paintings and the pull of the familiar ensure that Southeast Asian art remains the main draw in the region.

But events like the Tresors international art fair, held annually in Singapore since 1993, offer the growing base of Asian art collectors a wide array of choices.

"Tresors has been bringing a lot of Western art into Singapore and that has started stirring up people's interest in different collecting fields, from prints to contemporary art to impressionist paintings," said Quek Chin Yeow, Sotheby's Asia director.

The six-day fine art and antiques fair, held last month, featured about 70 exhibitors and drew nearly 16,000 visitors from around the region.

Sales figures for this year's fair were not yet available, but a spokeswoman for the organizers said last year's sales were estimated at US$20 million.

"I see all types of buyers here -- from the $10,000 buyer to the $1 million buyer," said Barbara Nino, head of New-York based International Art Acquisitions Inc., which saw a steady stream of visitors through its corner booth at Tresors.

"Now that people have bought the home, the car, the jewelry, they're moving towards the arts. It's also a diversification of one's investment portfolio," Nino said.

Still, buying a work of art needn't always be a weighty decision.

Design consultant Chaun Soh, who calls herself a young collector, said her two collector's edition etchings by U.S. artist Enrico Embroli, at US$1,050 apiece, were "impulse buys".

"I don't even consider the potential investment value. I look at a piece and if it stirs something in me, I go with my instincts," Soh said.