High tea with Patrick Flores
As chief curator of National Gallery Singapore for the past three years, Patrick Flores is as willing to talk about trade routes and diaspora as a curatorial framework for the museum going forward as he is to discuss Jollibee or Heart Evangelista’s opening Paris Fashion Week for Vietnamese designer Phan Huy.
Flores is a multilayered academic and cultural observer; a guest scholar of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2014; and he was the artistic director of Singapore Biennale 2019 and curator of the Philippine and Taiwan Pavilions at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and 2022, respectively. Taking Southeast Asia’s untold stories around the world is part of his mission.
We sat with him inside Fairmont Singapore’s Anti:Dote restaurant, which is hosting “An Impressionist Inspired Afternoon Tea” during the run of “Into the Modern” at National Gallery until March 1. Sitting down over a selection of TWG teas and savories and sweets modeled on the grain stacks and floral paintings of the Impressionists, he spoke about the museum’s possible future directions on the eve of its 10th anniversary.
PHILIPPINE STAR: How do you see National Gallery Singapore building on its strengths going forward?
PATRICK FLORES: One is to introduce new ways of telling the story, aside from art history. Of course, we won’t abandon art history, but sometimes it can get very specialized. The museum is for the general public, not only for art historians.
The point is to develop other modes of historical narrative, also to find a way to broaden the region beyond the geopolitical construct of ASEAN countries. So we would like to move into the wider world through the waters—meaning the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, the Pacific—to take us beyond the region.
Does that also reflect the migrant population here?
Yes, also the diaspora of Southeast Asians, in and out. Even before the ASEAN, there were connections—to pre-colonial, premodern times. There was trade. So when the nation states began to consolidate, the region became a bit smaller.
So this is actually an opportunity to redefine new connections, like in the 2023 show “Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America”?
Yes, these connections will take you to Indian Ocean, to West Asia, also to the Gulf, to North Africa. And the Indian Ocean will take you from Taiwan all the way to Madagascar.
How do you reach a younger audience raised on TikTok?
There are two pillars here. There’s “the people’s museum,” and the other pillar is “thought leadership.” The people’s museum, in general we have to be popular, not populist; accessible. In thought leadership, we have to be innovators in thinking, in curating to really try to balance the specialization, which is unique and distinct—because museums are different from malls. At the same time, the people’s museum, we need people who go to the malls to come also to us. That is the balancing act.
It’s a double layer, where they come in for that, and then they get the curatorial.
Hopefully. And that’s why, even if it’s not strictly art history, I think it still touches people.
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To mark 50 years of diplomatic relations between Singapore and Mexico, the National Gallery and the Asian Civilizations Museum recently opened “El Galeón Acapulco—Manila Somos Pacifico El Mundo que emergió del Trópico” in Mexico City, featuring 80 works from the National Collection.
