When Patrick Flores was artistic director of the Singapore Biennale 2019, he gave it the title Every Step in the Right Direction, in reference to Salud Algabre, a Filipino revolutionary who, in the 1930s, resisted US occupation and led a peasant movement that appeared to fail. “Responding to a scholar on the perception of its failure,” Flores explained, “Algabre reasoned that no movement fails, ‘each one is a step in the right direction.’”

Deep cuts like this are a testament to Flores’ well-known expertise as a scholar of Southeast Asian art and as a prolific art curator. He’s not only a professor of art studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003.

He’s also a curator at the Vargas Museum in Manila and an adjunct curator at the National Art Gallery of Singapore. Apart from the Singapore Biennale in 2019, Flores curated the Philippine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 1999. He has also published several books on Filipino and Southeast Asian art.