While the Philippines might not yet be considered one of the leading centers in the art world, the country has a vibrant and healthy art scene and market. The local art system already presents a mature structure, with long-established galleries and auction houses and regional artists with lengthy waiting lists commanding high prices.

According to most of the Filipino collectors we spoke with, the art scene in the Philippines dates back to even before WWII, despite at the time mainly focusing on memorabilia, religious art and the Philippines’ Masters. When discussing the pre-war era, people mention Roman Ongpin, a Chinese-Filipino businessman and philanthropist who established El 82 in 1882 in Binondo, Manila. The space was originally an art supply shop but later became a significant cultural and social hub, supporting Filipino artists and the Philippine Revolution when Alfonso Ongpin, his son, transformed it into a gallery that showcased important Filipino artworks.

The Filipino art market is very healthy and appears to be continuously growing. Exhibitions in Manila are often sold out, to the point that most galleries and artists don’t technically need to circulate their work elsewhere. The Philippines now has its own art fair, Art Fair Philippines in February, which was founded in 2013 by Lisa Periquet, Dindin Araneta and Trickie Lopa—passionate art enthusiasts and advocates for the Philippine art scene.

Since its beginning, the founder of the gallery Silverlens wanted to do things differently, applying an international gallery business model and aiming to bring Filipino artists abroad. We met with founder Isa Lorenzo, and co-director Rachel Rillo to learn more about their story and the Filipino art system in general.

The gallery’s Manila headquarters are in an industrial building in Makati, a financial center and one of the wealthiest parts of the metro city. There are other art galleries nearby, though this isn’t yet what you could rightly call an arts district.

The gallery has a large open space upstairs, meaning they can host two exhibitions simultaneously. When we visited, it was during the last days of a show by Filipino artist Bernardo Pacquing, who, with a similar approach to Arte Povera and Art Informel, mixes found objects to conceive new abstractions dense with memory while playing with notions of “ugly” and “messy.” The artist is quite popular in the Philippines, although he has rarely been shown abroad. In the other room, they had a show of a younger artist, Dina Gadia, who, applying the strategy of Pop art’s burst brushwork and acrylic washes over printing ink, works on the images of school books Americans brought to the Philippines during the occupation, problematizing the imagination created during this time.

In Manila, we met with Rillo, who, after showing us around, invited us to sit at a large round table in the office. She told us that the gallery was founded in Manila in 2004 by Lorenzo, and then she joined in 2007 as co-director. Initially, the gallery focused on photography, then expanded to other media with time and the market evolving. More importantly, since their start, they had the ambition to be an international gallery, able to promote artists from the Philippines and the broader South Asia region to the global contemporary art world.

Rillo recalled that other galleries criticized their model, not understanding why they decided to have a bigger staff and space and participate in the international fairs. Most can easily survive and even do very well just by tapping into the local market, and so other Filipino galleries tend to avoid international fairs as they don’t see the need to invest money in something that will most likely bring more loss than profit. But to Lorenzo, from the very beginning, it was clear that Silverlens had to play a global game.

The gallery opened an outpost in Singapore in 2010, which was open for four years, and they started participating in international fairs. In 2017, they decided to expand their space in Makati to show how they could be the local powerhouse.

According to Rillo, another factor in their stable growth has been their unique approach to the business: being artists themselves, their philosophy is artists first, and their aim is to provide the platform for creatives to build solid careers within institutional settings instead of only thinking in terms of market success. While the market is fueling the careers of many Filipino artists, it’s a short-term strategy.

The institutional interest also pushed the gallerists to consider a big move to open in New York during the pandemic. Lorenzo told Observer that, “it was during the pandemic that we noticed that international curators were interested in the region. Perhaps as a product of art travel restrictions and museum programs halting during that time, we had several conversations with institutions from the U.S., that hinted at an interest in art from our side of the continent.”

The challenge was significant, considering the prices in New York, but a space came to them as if by fate, Rillo recalled: “We started to ask around and explored, and decided to rely on an agent a friend suggested to us. We gave him the exact street and position where we wanted to be; we said either that or nothing. After a few days, he returned to us with an unreal offer, and the timing was right.” As sometimes happens, chances in life let things flow. After making the necessary arrangements, in 2022, the two opened in a premier position in Chelsea, at 505 on 24th Street, between Kasmin and Marianne Boesky.

The program space in Chelsea clearly shows their target is, first and foremost, institutions: this summer, they have a multimedia show curated by Lorenzo, “Hard Fantasy / Soft Reality,” featuring a group of Filipino and South Asians who stage a multifaceted and futuristic exploration of a body and identity reality that is constantly evolving today, despite the resilience of various conservative social systems that persist in parts of Southeast Asia. Video, sculptures and installation works are predominant in the exhibition, with many of the artists included already boasting institutional recognition and projects in their resumes.

When asked about feedback thus far and if they saw interest growing, Lorenzo responded that since the gallery opened in Chelsea, “interest has become more palpable, not only for art that comes from SEA but from the diaspora. The response and the energy from the Filipino-American and Asian-American community are overwhelming. So yes, there is an internationally growing audience in New York, but this is not something that just happened; it is the result of 20 years of Silverlens and 15 years of being part of several important art fairs.”

Silverlens now regularly participates in international art fairs, including the Armory Show, Art Basel Hong Kong, Art Fair Philippines and S.E.A. Focus, a more curated boutique event dedicated to South Asia art in Singapore during Art Week in January. “It’s more like a curated show or a Biennale,” Rillo explained. “I like the dialogue that this fair also creates with other colleagues in the region.” They used to do other fairs like Frieze London, but there are some regions where Filippino and South Asian art still do not resonate much with the public.

The Philippines has a complicated colonial history that connects it with Spain, of course, but also with Central and Latino America with the Galleons and later with the States for their influence during decolonization. In these geographical and intercultural exchanges, the Silverlens program can function as an essential platform to problematize and explore this history, these interconnections and the unique cultural hybridization that resulted from that.

When asked if there’s something particular in Filipino art today, compared to their Asian colleagues and their international counterparts, Lorenzo commented, “The Philippines’ complicated colonial history is ongoing. Our art history mostly starts and continues from a very European art practice/history via Spain via the Catholic church. Then, our modern and contemporary leans heavily on American postmodernism, politics and pop culture. It is in these interconnections and cultural hybridity (as you said) that make for a very dynamic art language both locally and in the diaspora.”

In the deeper analysis we had a chance to undertake while exploring the local art scene and talking with some of its players and patrons, what the art system in the Philippines seems to be now lacking is just a national infrastructure of public and institutional support. Surprisingly, despite the maturity of the system and the growing popularity of contemporary art here, there’s still no national museum or national collection of modern and contemporary art, except the national bank and the university galleries, which are very active. While the market for contemporary Filipino art is growing, challenges such as limited public funding for the arts and the need for more professional art management still need to be addressed.

Various private initiatives, however, are trying to compensate for this gap. One of the first was Pintô Art Museum, founded by Dr. Joven Cuanang, a neurologist and art patron, in 1988 as the first museum dedicated to contemporary Filipino art open to the public. Although the entire system relies on private endeavors, many local collectors, including regional and very established international names, are already planning to create private museums to open their collections to the public.

Meanwhile, Filipino artists are gaining growing international recognition, as we can see in the U.S. from the extensive survey MoMA Ps1 is dedicating to Pacita Abad (which showed at SFMOMA after premiering at Walker Art Center),  the video work by Martha Atianza currently presented in ninety billboards in Times Square as part of the historical art program “Midnight moment,” as well as just the many names from the Philippines and the South Asian Region region that are showing this year at the Biennale.

The role of local art galleries in the Philippines like Silverlens is the key to putting the country’s contemporary art onto the world stage—participating in international fairs and bringing it to the attention of international institutions is step one. This will further validate Filipino artists’ careers and establish them within a global art history narrative when the national scene is still struggling to find public support.