The Big 25

This year marks Gajah Gallery’s 25th anniversary. Its founder, Jasdeep Sandhu, offers a retrospective of the gallery’s significant presence in the Southeast Asian art scene.

- Allisa Norani

Jasdeep Sandhu was fresh out of law school before he founded Gajah Gallery. He would find himself scurrying around Singapore with paintings tucked under his arm as he put together exhibitions and learnt the ins and outs of the regional art scene. This year, the gallery that he runs turns 25 – a monumental milestone for Sandhu and his team, who have dedicated the past quarter of a century to raising awareness of Southeast Asian art history through thoughtprovoking artistic and curatorial directions.

The team’s efforts are palpable across the exhibitions it curates; with Ashley Bickerton’s showcase being one of its most recent. Bickerton’s second solo show in Singapore was a massive undertaking, one that coalesced together the last decade of his works, including Blue Man, Mitochondrial Eve, Silver Ladies, Coral, Wall-Wall and Flotsam. The exhibition re-contextualised Bickerton’s work as wholly Southeast Asian through the lens of an ‘outsider’, as he worked away from the Indonesian art centres of Jakarta and Yogyakarta. But the jubilee celebration is just the beginning of what’s to come, Sandhu muses.

How is Gajah Gallery celebrating its 25th anniversary?