Public Programs @ the Institute
Series: Kirk Varnedoe Memorial Lecture
A Different Twentieth Century: Proposing Southeast Asian Art History Curatorially
Thursday, March 12, 2026, 6:00pm
Lecture by Patrick Flores, Chief Curator, National Gallery Singapore
This talk reflects on the possibilities of curating Southeast Asia, reconsidering the gestures of art history and exhibition-making that supplement a regional aspiration. When visitors stepped into the National Gallery Singapore in 2025, a different century unfolded before them. It began with the interwar years in the exhibition City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s, followed through by Order is Essential, focusing on the Philippine-born Spanish artist Fernando Zóbel who practiced in three continents from the post-war period to the eighties. Zóbel figured as well in Where Ink Tides Meet, an exhibition on the medium of ink across styles and periods; and the seventies and the eighties would find form in Diplomacy and Desire, which dwelled on the allegories and portraits of the Indonesian painter Basoeki Abdullah in his Asian practice. In this reworlding, the region, robust and porous, widens and claims affinities with the rest of the world, which in turn is remapped and reimagined. Southeast Asia’s locality and extent, or its extensive locality, is finally rendered as a geopolitical construction as well as a curatorial fiction.
Patrick Flores is Chief Curator of National Gallery Singapore. He is Director of the Philippine Contemporary Art Network and was Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1999. Among his publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008); Art After War: 1948-1969 (2015); and Raymundo Albano: Texts (2017). He co-edited The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader with T. K. Sabapathy (2022). He was a Guest Scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014. He was the Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale in 2019 and Curator of the Pavilions of the Philippines (2015) and Taiwan (2022) at the Venice Biennale. He curated the Philippine Pavilion as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2025.
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