Recent years have seen the Asian art market growing exponentially - major international auction houses are expanding across Hong Kong and Shanghai, and in 2022 Frieze premiered its first Asian art fair in Seoul, joining Art Basel Hong Kong and other major international art fairs across the region.
But collectors and gallerists are also looking further south from the East Asian art world strongholds, with the Southeast Asian art market quickly on the rise. Just this past January, Southeast Asia’s largest art fair, ART SG, launched in Singapore alongside the fifth annual S.E.A Focus. At the same time, Western and Asian auction houses are moving to become more engaged in the region.
As interest in Southeast Asian artists comes to the fore, Mustard is excited to offer work by two of the region’s most promising artists: Roby Dwi Antono and Suanjaya Kencut. Both hailing from Indonesia, they are each based in the cultural hub of Yogyakarta in Java, a city known for its traditional artistic heritage that now appears to be fostering the next generation of Indonesian tastemakers.
Roby Dwi Antono was born in 1990 in Semarang, Java. A self-taught painter and former graphic designer, Antono looks to Surrealism for inspiration, as well as contemporaries such as Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, and Javier Calleja. Many of his canvases, drawings and prints feature the arresting gaze of wide-eyed children or dream-like scenes with mythological creatures. Infused throughout his oeuvre is a childlike wonder stemming from the artist’s memories, dreams, and imagination.
Since first appearing at auctions in Jakarta and Singapore in 2013, Antono’s market has seen a recent jump in demand. In October 2022, his oil painting Semburat Urat (2020) hammered for 1,900,000 HKD at Phillips & Poly Hong Kong, nearly eight times the high estimate. Regularly achieving high prices at international auctions, especially in Hong Kong, Antono’s work can often also be seen exhibited in galleries across Asia and beyond. He notably has an upcoming solo exhibition with London art gallery Carl Kostyál.
Suanjaya Kencut was born in Badung in Bali in 1994 and completed his MFA at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts, Yogyakarta in 2012. He was inspired by Neil Gaiman’s characters in Coraline to create compositions of stuffed dolls with buttons for eyes. As eyes are known as the windows to the soul, Kencut aims to subvert this expectation of the viewer by replacing these ‘windows’ with plain buttons. Dolls are also reminiscent of childhood, bringing a sense of joy and positivity to his paintings and prints.
Kencut’s doll-like figures have taken the art world by storm, making their major auction debut at Sotheby’s London in August 2022 with Defense (2021). This acrylic painting achieved £38,000, nearly thirteen times its high estimate. Since then the artist has featured at auction regularly in London, as well as in Hong Kong and Seoul. Kencut has enjoyed many exhibitions across Indonesia, and has most recently held solo exhibitions at GR Gallery in New York and Lorin Gallery in Los Angeles.