Meet the entrepreneurs who have made championing the arts their business—and are fully committed to helping artists in Singapore thrive. In the second of a three-part series, The Artling's Talenia Phua Gajardo and Mandala Group's Ben Jones plant the seeds of a new artist residency programme
When Ben Jones, the co-founder and CEO of Mandala Group, the new partner and co-manager of Straits Clan, and his team were looking for ways to support the arts community in Singapore, they found the answer from inside the fold: “We realised that we were in this extremely rare position of having some spare real estate within the building.”
Together with Talenia Phua Gajardo, the founder and CEO of art and design consultancy and online gallery The Artling, they went about converting the space on the third floor of the club in Bukit Pasoh into a Creative Studio, a platform to grow the exposure of artists and creatives, and encourage them to collaborate on new works, while also engaging with club members.
“Over the past year, we saw that quite a number of studios were no longer accessible—and that a lot of artists and creatives were working from home and didn’t have access to their usual spaces. The Creative Studio is a starting point to giving the creative scene a little bit more exposure,” shares Phua Gajardo. The Artling has been a long-standing partner of Straits Clan, which is part of hospitality company The Lo & Behold Group, since its early days, helping to put together the club’s art collection. This latest collaboration will form a part of the larger Straits Clan Arts Programme.
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“Arts and culture have always been critically important to the community within Straits Clan as well as our business Mandala. We have a really great arts community within the club, from artists and curators, to gallerists and collectors, to those who have an interest in art but maybe not a great deal of familiarity or exposure. So I feel like it is our responsibility to work on a programme where we can provide access across the full-spectrum of engagement,” explains Jones. “And even though we are a private club—by definition, that sort of implies that we are closed doors—we want to develop our programmes in such a way that we provide public access to art.”
For the launch of the Creative Studio in January, four up-and-coming artists: Dawn Ang aka Aeropalmics, Tiffany Loy, Masuri Mazlan and André Wee were hand-picked, by a selection committee consisting of Jones and Phua Gajardo, as well as The Artling’s gallery director Kim Tay and Straits Clan Arts Programme consultant Camilla Hewitson, as the first participants of the inaugural four-month residency programme. The artists will mount a show of new works produced at the end of the residency period.
(Related: The Artling Opens Its First Physical Showroom In Shanghai)