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ART SG, Southeast Asia’s largest international art fair, closed its 2026 edition on Sunday at Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands Resort and Convention Center, with plenty of reported sales—but nothing approaching last year’s sale of a $1.2 million Pablo Picasso work.
Still, blue-chip galleries did well. Thaddaeus Ropac had the highest reported sale price of the fair: a Raqib Shaw work, Fall of the Jade Kingdom I – Paradise Lost Chapter II (2014–2023), at £475,000 (or about $650,000), as well as Antony Gormley’s SET VII (2024) for £450,000. The gallery also sold works by David Salle, Joan Snyder, Lee Kangso, Tom Sachs, and Oliver Beer, among others.
Just hours into the preview, White Cube reported the placement of a £225,000 Marguerite Humeau sculpture and Michael Armitage’s 1: The Trial (2025) for $280,000; both went to Singapore-based collectors. The gallery also sold works by Danh Vo (€280,000) and Raqib Shaw (£275,000), as well as three gunpowder-on-canvas Cai Guo-Qiang works for $120,000 each—Cai recently had an exhibition at the gallery’s Bermondsey location—and two works by Ibrahim Mahama for €100,000 each.
Among the Asia-based galleries, South Korea’s Johyun Gallery reported the strongest showing, selling out its presentation of Lee Bae works for a cumulative total of $2.76 million. The China- and Taiwan-based Asia Art Center said it had nearly sold out its booth of works by Ju Ming and Li Chen, with prices ranging from $70,000 to $400,000.
“You see the majority [of attendees] are local collectors,” White Cube Asia managing director Wendy Xu told ARTnews. “Singapore is kind of the heart for Southeast Asia. So we see collectors from Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, China, and Hong Kong.”
Indeed, the fair reported 43,000 visitors over four days, headlined by a star-studded list of attendees, including major Asia-based collectors such as Agnes Lew and Fernando Zobel de Ayala; ARTnews Top 200 collectors Lonti Ebers, Belinda Tanoto, and Purat Osanthanugrah, who recently celebrated the opening of Dib Bangkok; and directors and curators from institutions including the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Yuz Museum and the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, the Sunpride Foundation in Hong Kong, Museum MACAN in Jakarta, and Artspace Sydney, among others.
“There is a lot of organic activity that’s really starting to take root here in Singapore in a very interesting and very exciting way,” ART SG cofounder Magnus Renfrew said at the fair’s opening press conference. “The energy levels have been really high. The international visitors have really been enjoying seeing each other here and discovering great things that Singapore has to offer in itself, but also, importantly, as a key convening point for Southeast Asia.”
But attention at the fair was squarely focused on Southeast Asia and growing its local art scene. In her opening remarks, fair director Shuyin Yang said ART SG has played a meaningful role in shifting Southeast Asia “from an underrepresented region to a region whereby we’ve increased recognition and support by many committed collectors as well as strong galleries.” She added that the fair has embraced the idea of bringing Southeast Asia to the world—and the world to Southeast Asia.
That emphasis was evident in the fair’s decision to partner for the first time with S.E.A. Focus, a long-running boutique art fair also held during Singapore Art Week. For ART SG’s fourth edition, S.E.A. Focus operated as a fair-within-a-fair at Marina Bay Sands and was curated by John Z. W. Tung under the 2026 theme “The Humane Agency”. “Art allows us to feel, to empathize, and in doing so, it allows us to chart our own humane ways forward,” said Tung at the fair’s opening press conference. “I see all of these artworks in S.E.A.Focus as offering proposals for humane and better futures.” Sixteen galleries explicitly focused on Southeast Asian art were selected for the platform, with the most high-profile participant being Silverlens, which has locations in New York and Manila.
“The strength of Singapore is in bringing people from all over together,” said Silverlens founder Isa Lorenzo, whose gallery previously operated at the Singapore art hub Gillman Barracks and was participating in S.E.A. Focus for the fifth time. “The market is more institutional. It’s more museums, foundations, curators—part of the support system of art. It’s not so much a private collector market.”
Also at S.E.A. Focus, Indonesian artist Arahmaiani Feisal—known for her community-based practice and decades-long self-imposed exile—presented a series of flags with Jakarta-based ISA Art Gallery. The works featured words selected by different communities in their respective languages, including “Resist” in Indonesian and “Happiness” in Chinese. “It’s quite encouraging, because there’s a lot of people interested in Southeast Asian art now,” Deborah Iskander, president and director of ISA Art Gallery, which was participating in ART SG for the third time, told ARTnews.
The rest of the fair was divided into its main Galleries section, a Focus section, for single-artist presentations, and the Futures section, which spotlighted galleries established within the last decade and introduced a $In the main section, Los Angeles–based Commonwealth and Council shared a booth with Shanghai’s Antenna Space. Commonwealth and Council presented a series of works by Lotus L. Kang featuring stainless-steel mixing bowls filled with cast-aluminum Asian pears, lotus roots, kelp knots, and other forms, alongside acrylic and ink works by Rosha Yaghmai. Antenna Space showed an oil-on-canvas depiction of a window and a tribute to Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin, both by Evelyn Taocheng Wang.
“Asia continues to be a very important growing market and art world,” Kibum Kim, co-director and partner at Commonwealth and Council, told ARTnews. “This particular year seemed like a great moment to be in Singapore, with all of the different kinds of institutional projects opening up in Southeast Asia.”
Among several first-time exhibitors was Medellín-based Galería Duque Arango, which brought works by its hometown hero, the late Fernando Botero. Prices ranged from $95,000, for a drawing from 2008, to $2.95 million, for a 1997 painting titled A Family—the most expensive work at the fair. The gallery also presented two works by Olga de Amaral, including an $825,000 seven-paneled work of linen, gesso, acrylic, and gold leaf. By the fair’s opening, the gallery had already received two offers, one for a work by Sair García and another for a piece by Ariel Cabrera.
“We have a lot of friends here in Singapore,” second-generation gallery co-owner Miguel Duque told ARTnews. “Singapore is a thriving market. They appreciate art. They do love Latin American art as well. So we figured that we have to be here.”
New Delhi–based Nature Morte participated for the first time through South Asia Insights, a partnership with Indian motorcycle company TVS. The gallery sold three works totaling around $36,000 by Singapore Biennale participant Ayesha Singh. “Singapore is such a cosmopolitan city, and there are a lot of wealthy Indians who migrated from India and have been in Singapore for generations—it’s also a financial capital,” Juhi Sharma, associate director of sales at Nature Morte, told ARTnews. “A lot of people are here, and I think there’s definitely an appetite for South Asian art.”
An installation view of of neugerriemschneider’s booth at the 2026 edition of ART SG.
Courtesy ART SG
On the fair’s second day, Toronto-based Patel Brown, another first-time exhibitor in the Futures sector, showed works by Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka—whose tapestries were a hit at fairs last fall—Shaheer Zazai, and Filipino Canadian artist Marigold Santos. Santos’s drawings and etchings depicting the aswang, a shapeshifting figure from Filipino folklore, won the Futures Prize. Fifteen of the 16 $2,500 ink-on-marbled-paper works sold by that day.
“She just found out, because it’s a different time zone where she is right now, in Calgary, Canada,” gallery partner Gareth Brown told ARTnews. “She’s very happy.”
German gallery neugerriemschneider was one of the few galleries to participate in both ART SG and S.E.A. Focus. At the former, it presented works by Haegue Yang, Ai Weiwei, Tomás Saraceno, and Olafur Eliasson; at the latter, it showed a 2021 three-channel video installation by Ho Tzu Nyen.
“They have different DNA,” gallery cofounder Tim Neuger told ARTnews, explaining the distinction between the fairs. “They have a dialogue with each other. If you look closely at S.E.A. Focus, it’s more like a curated exhibition with the support of different galleries, and ART SG is a classical art fair.”
If ART SG’s fourth edition made one thing clear, it was that the city is no longer simply hosting the region’s art world—it is actively shaping it. With strong early sales, growing institutional engagement, and increasing confidence in Southeast Asian voices alongside global blue-chip names, ART SG continues to cement its role as a key convening point for the art world in Asia.
