2025-01-18
8 分钟Foreign.
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I'm Tom Edwards.
Magnus Renfrew is the co founder of ArtsG, Southeast Asia's leading international art fair and Singapore's largest art event.
Now in its third year, ArtsG is consolidating its place as a major stop on the global art circuit.
With a background that includes founding and directing some of Asia's most prestigious art fairs, such as Art Basel Hong Kong and Taipei Dangdai, Magnus brings years of expertise to positioning Singapore as the region's cultural and artistic hub.
So how did he build Singapore standing as the stage for Southeast Asia's art scene?
And how do you make Affair stand out for the trade and collectors alike?
Well, here is Magnus with more on how the journey began.
Art SG is the leading art fair in Southeast Asia and is rapidly asserting itself as a key fixture on the international art calendar.
Well, we started looking many years ago at Singapore and Southeast Asia as having a real possibility for a major international hub fair.
Southeast Asia has a population approaching the size of Europe and is home to many of the fastest growing economies in the world with very positive demographics, and Singapore is the natural hub for Southeast Asia.
That, combined with the fact that there is just such an incredible diversity and quality of cultural production across the region, means that it's a very fertile context to have a meeting place and the gathering place for the international art world.
The art world has changed out of all recognition over the last 16 years or so since we started Art Hong Kong back in 2008, which was then of course rebranded as art Basel in 2013.
So I think that many of the different constituencies around the region now really deserve to have a fair in their own right.
And of course, Southeast Asia is such a huge area with many affluent people there, entrepreneurs and so on, who have been making significant amounts of money, who have become increasingly interested in buying contemporary art.
And we saw that whereas North Asia was very well served by fairs like Taipei Dangdai and so on, that Southeast Asia really, there was a gap there which really needed to be filled.
And in consultation with galleries and different stakeholders, they felt that there was a real role for a fair for Southeast Asia based in Singapore, there's a lot of interest in dynamism in the city.