Singapore Art Week puts women artists from the region to the fore – The Art Newspaper

This yr’s Singapore Artwork Week (SAW) contains a number of celebrations of Southeast Asia’s feminine artists, together with the discharge of the e-book You Are Seen: Girls’s Modern Artwork Apply in Southeast Asia, and the exhibition Concern No Energy: Girls Imagining In any other case of 5 trailblazing artists from the area on the Nationwide Gallery Singapore (NGS). “It’s going to be a giant ladies’s second!” says Audrey Yeo, the president of the Artwork Galleries Affiliation Singapore (AGAS) and founding father of the Singapore gallery Yeo Workshop, which printed You Are Seen and can present Indonesia’s Citra Sasmita at its Gillman Barracks area and at Artwork SG.

The initiatives replicate many years of ongoing efforts to present ladies artists their full due, and belie an advanced terrain for them across the various area. “It’s onerous to generalise what the present scenario is for girls artists in Southeast Asia,” says Krystina Lyon, a collector and the creator of You Are Seen. “International locations with much less institutional assist or the place censorship and conservative social norms persist are typically tougher for girls artists. It additionally is dependent upon the person artwork observe and the way provocative it’s to the conservative and patriarchal house contexts.”

Lyon cites how the Filipina efficiency artist Eisa Jocson “has been extra broadly recognised internationally due to the subversiveness of her work, but the Philippines has a splendidly established artwork scene that features many acknowledged ladies artists like Imelda Cajipe-Endaya, Julie Lluch, Nicole Coson, Jill Paz and Pacita Abad, to call just a few.” Artists working in efficiency, like Singapore’s Suzann Victor and Indonesia’s Arahmaiani, confronted further obstacles resulting from former prohibitions on that medium. “Chuu Wai from Myanmar now lives in exile resulting from clashes with the navy regime. Citra Sasmita, who’s now properly established internationally—with a solo present at London’s Barbican final yr—has additionally skilled tensions from the native market in Bali resulting from her resistance to deeply entrenched restrictions [favouring tourism over Indigenous rights],” Lyon says.

The NGS exhibition Concern No Energy (till 15 November) options Malaysia’s Nirmala Dutt, the aforementioned Imelda Cajipe-Endaya, Indonesia’s Dolorosa Sinaga, Thailand’s Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Singapore’s 2026 Venice Biennale Pavilion artist Amanda Heng. The NGS’s chief curator Patrick Flores, says it “permits us to situate Singapore’s personal socially responsive and gender-sensitive practices inside a wider Southeast Asian context. By putting Amanda Heng’s work alongside the opposite Southeast Asian artists in Concern No Energy, we see how Singaporean considerations, from gendered labour to the politics of public area, resonate with regional histories of activism, post-authoritarian transition, and on a regular basis resistance.” The exhibition moreover, “sheds mild on how Singapore’s creative transformations had been by no means remoted or existed in a vacuum. Most of the questions these artists are grappling with—modernisation, nation-building, group and care—had been shared throughout Southeast Asia.”

The Singapore Artwork Museum (SAM) commonly spotlights the area’s feminine artists, akin to final yr’s solo present of the Malaysian multidisciplinary artist Yee I-lann, whereas Womanifesto and the Filipina collective Kasibulan have offered platforms for elevating the profile of Southeast Asian ladies artists. Hong Kong’s non-profit Asia Artwork Archive has additionally undertaken intensive programming and analysis on regional ladies’s subjects

Out there, Yeo says, the Southeast Asia panorama “mirrors a lot of the world: there are merely fewer ladies artists than males, and the disparities echo throughout pricing, visibility, and alternatives. The explanations are not often singular. They sit inside layers of cultural expectation—conventional gender roles, household obligations, and the quiet, inherited scripts about ambition that form who feels permitted to take up area within the artwork world.”

Lyon says she determined to put in writing You Are Seen as a result of she noticed two gaps: “An absence of accessible narratives that centre Southeast Asian ladies and gender various artists inside each regional and worldwide artwork histories; and a scarcity of sensible, artist-centred documentation that might be utilized by curators, college students and collectors”. The challenge grew from her work as a collector and researcher, eager to doc how the 35 artists featured within the e-book “sustained and superior” their practices, to lift consciousness of them, to offer a useful resource for researchers and curators, and to advocate for “extra equitable institutional and market recognition”.

“Conversations about gender and feminism are rather more evident now than a decade in the past—in tutorial conferences, in biennales, and within the programming of main museums,” Lyon says. She anticipates that coming years will see three parallel traits: extra archival initiatives that centre ladies artists and lift their international prominence; that the continued efforts of artist-run and feminist platforms will reshape the bigger institution; and that the gallery-level market will proceed to enhance. “Nevertheless, main retrospectives [and] canonical histories underneath institutional remits will all the time lag behind except stakeholders decide to long-term programmatic change,” she says. “Visibility is enhancing however for lasting traction there’ll should be extra funding in curatorial fellowships, acquisition insurance policies, educating curricula and analysis funding.”

Concern No Energy: Girls Imagining In any other case, Nationwide Gallery Singapore, 9 January-15 November 2026