Affordable art lures middle class Singapore collectors

Singapore art galleries are luring budding art investors with affordable art.

Around ten pieces by Damien Hirst, all of them prints, will be offered for less than $8,000 along with thousands of other works of art at the Affordable Art Fair Singapore in November, reports Reuters

Hirst is best known for works featuring preserved animal corpses that cost millions. But in line with the art showcase's name, nothing will go for more than S$10,000 -- an effort to lure budding art investors unable to afford the stratospheric prices commanded by pieces in more conventional auction rooms or art events.

As the ranks of middle-class art buyers in wealthy Singapore grow. A growing number of these relatively well-paid executives who may not be upper class have caught the art bug and are no longer content to just buy pretty paintings and sculptures to decorate their homes, but are seeking out specific themes.

"I like paintings, particularly with women as a subject. It can be mother and child, faces of women or nudes," said Lou Dela Pena, a senior executive in an advertising firm in her late 30s.

She has 10 paintings in her Singapore apartment and several more back in her native Philippines.

At the inaugural Affordable Art Fair in Singapore last year, she bought two paintings for under S$5,000 each, including a stylised ink drawing of a Japanese woman by Australian artist Nanami Cowdroy that had been brought in by an art gallery from Indonesia.

All in, galleries that exhibited at last year's show sold S$1.75 million worth of art, making the Singapore event "the most successful first edition we had in any market," said show director Camilla Hewitson.

Hewitson said Affordable Art, a UK firm that currently organises exhibitions in nine cities around the world, hopes to expand into greater China in 2013 to complement its exhibitions in Singapore and Melbourne, Australia.

Gallery owners say the growing interest in art in Singapore and elsewhere in Asia is due to the region's rapid economic growth, creating a large middle class with extra money to spend.