Manila Beyond Institutional Capital

Metropolis Manila, which contains one municipality and 16 cities, including the Philippines’s capital, Manila – its international port of entry and the crux of its industrial development – is among Southeast Asia’s most actively collecting regions for art. Describing Manila as an art capital means including those who operate through overlapping networks and forms of cultural labour. These are artists, art collectives, cultural workers, curators, gallerists, collectors and educators, among others, who continually sustain the city’s cultural and creative life despite uneven institutional conditions. Unlike nearby global art capitals and regional art centres like Hong Kong and Singapore, Manila simply does not adhere to a state-supported cultural apparatus. Its art ecosystem unfolds through diffuse yet intimately interconnected communities shaped by private initiatives, social relationships and alternative support systems.

Among others, these conditions have helped shape the city’s market ecology wherein the distinctions between commercial and cultural labour often remain porous. Commercial galleries such as Silverlens, founded by Isa Lorenzo in 2004 and now operating from both Manila and New York, and Galleria Duemila, the longest-running commercial art gallery in the Philippines, founded in 1975 by Silvana Ancelotti-Diaz, functioned beyond artist representation. They have assumed institution-building roles frequently associated elsewhere with publicly funded organisations or museums, such as archiving and organising pedagogical programs. “Galleries should have the duty in recording, beyond the price lists, to know the artists well. We are the first stop for an artist. Museums only come in when an artist has already been established,” Ancelotti-Diaz shares.

Recent Acquisitions, 2025-26 (installation view, Ateneo Art Gallery). Photo: Reeltime Photography. Courtesy Ateneo Art Gallery

Artist-run initiatives like Green Papaya Art Projects, founded in 2000 by Norberto Roldan and Donna Miranda, and 98B COLLABoratory, established in 2012 by Mark Salvatus and Mayumi Hirano together with their friends who are also artists and cultural workers, emerged not simply as alternative spaces, but as loose infrastructures responding to the absence of sustainable public cultural support. On one hand, academic institutions including the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle- College of Saint Benilde, which all house university art spaces which actively cater to contemporary art projects – namely the Jorge B. Vargas Museum & Filipiniana Research Center (or UP Vargas Museum), which used to be helmed by now Chief Curator of National Gallery Singapore, Patrick Flores, Ateneo Art Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) Manila – remain relevant as important sites of art discourse and exhibition-making, beyond the professional training of artists and cultural workers through the universities’ academic programmes.

On the other hand, the fact that the city’s market ecology did not emerge through coordinated, holistic cultural policy remains true: the Philippine Creative Industries Development Act, which is meant to protect and strengthen the rights and capacities of artists, among others, was only enacted into law in 2022 and still has vague mechanisms for its overall implementation. And it was only in 1992, when the de facto local department of culture, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, was established, that its role included having an endowment fund for arts and culture.

Ancelotti-Diaz shares, “Since there were very little sales [during a time when there were other galleries established], there was really a very good friendship among galleries to support each other and at the same time, support the artists.” At a time when commercial infrastructure was comparatively fragile, Galleria Duemila, along with earlier generations of galleries, helped sustain artistic practices. These relational structures reflect conditions within postcolonial cultural economies across Southeast Asia: poor public infrastructure often required artistic communities to develop alternative systems of support and circulation. In Manila, the ecosystem has always been precarious but surprisingly spirited. And this is because of interpersonal networks, collaborative efforts and private support.

98B, Manila. Courtesy 98B

This dynamic is obviously visible in the capital city’s collecting culture. “Some private collectors have taken on the role of stewards of culture,” shares Lourdes A. Samson, who, together with her husband Michelangelo, donated a group of works that had been exhibited at Surrounded by Water (SBW), an artist-run space which emerged in 1998 in Angono, the Philippines’s better-known art capital, to the Ateneo Art Gallery just last year. The Samsons have collected Southeast Asian contemporary art for almost two decades now; their collection, named the Monsoon Southeast Asia Collection, is indicative of ‘a weather pattern associated with countries in the region’. While Manila is one of Southeast Asia’s most vigorous collecting cultures, there are certain aspects of its ecosystem that remain driven by acquisitions rather than long-term institutional support. “We have a good collecting culture, but it is transactional”, Samson says. “We haven’t reached the maturity of other markets where collecting has progressed to patronage.”

The emergence of Art Fair Philippines in 2013 and its affordable precursor, Art in the Park in 2006 (both events were founded by Geraldine ‘Dindin’ Araneta, Trickie Lopa and Lisa Ongpin-Periquet) transformed collecting habits locally while also positioning Manila within broader Southeast Asian circuits. “There’s a lot of national collecting … which means it’s hard for international galleries, for example, to be able to sell here because they have to shift that mindset among local collectors. But I think slowly that might happen,” shares Samson.

The local market has expanded significantly over the past decade through the burgeoning of fairs, including institutional ones like the ‘national art fair’ ManilART in 2009, which collector and researcher Joseph Sedfrey S. Santiago describes as a relatively new segment of the primary market, within and outside the national capital region, auctions and international visibility. More local artists are circulating through biennales, regional exhibitions and gallery shows abroad. It is also important to note that diaspora networks continue to shape the visibility of Philippine contemporary art globally.

Lourdes A. Samson. Courtesy Lourdes A. Samson

Manila’s distinctiveness has been dependent on the density of its artistic communities and the strong persistence of loose cultural networks within an ecosystem that functions through relationality. The city has its own contradictions. It is commercially active with weak public institutional support. Its strong international visibility is dependent on private support, which is suggestive of how contemporary art economies emerge under postcolonial conditions.

The significance of Manila as an art capital does not lie in institutional concentration or scale in relation to the market; it is in the density and porousness of relationships that continue to shape artistic production across the city as a nexus, extending across its archipelagic nation-state. With its visibility expanding within and across regional and global circuits, the challenge is no longer about Manila resembling more centralised art capitals. It is whether its deeply relational cultural economy can further grow without losing the networks and networked relationships that hold it together.