Standard Chartered looks beyond Formula 1 and football to promote art

Standard Chartered has long been associated with events that move at speed, from Formula 1 and Liverpool Football Club to marathons.

Its latest cultural bet, however, asks audiences to do the opposite: slow down and look quietly at what is before them.

The bank is expanding its sponsorship portfolio into arts and culture in Singapore, partnering Singapore Art Museum (SAM) as principal supporter of Hiroshi Sugimoto: Form Is Emptiness, the Japanese artist’s first major survey exhibition in South-east Asia.

“Partnerships across the public and private sectors play an important role in sustaining a thriving arts industry and broadening access to world-class experiences,” says Patrick Lee, Standard Chartered’s CEO for Singapore, and CEO for ASEAN and South Asia.

The partnership, Lee adds, is intended to “create distinctive experiences” and “strengthen Singapore’s cultural ecosystem”, while bringing Sugimoto’s work to a wider audience that includes the bank’s clients and communities.

It is a notable change of pace for a sponsorship strategy largely built around sport, including the marathon. But the underlying principle is familiar: bringing clients, colleagues and communities together around shared interests and experiences.

Whereas football and motor racing offer speed, spectacle and mass audiences, art offers a more intimate form of engagement and a platform for building client relationships beyond the conventional business setting.

Singapore is an important place for the bank to broaden that approach. Standard Chartered has operated here since 1859 and today uses the country as its Asean hub. 

After more than 160 years building its presence in Singapore, the city-state is home to some of its global leadership and is its second-largest contributor to group income worldwide.

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Against that backdrop, Sugimoto is a natural choice for the shift. His work – shaped by five decades of inquiry into time and perception – asks audiences not to accelerate, but to slow down and look beyond the immediate moment to what endures through time.

That preoccupation is most closely associated with his striking photography, though the 78-year-old artist also works across sculpture, installation, architecture, writing, garden design and even the culinary and performing arts.

The Singapore exhibition draws those threads together through 63 works from 11 series, alongside 14 fossils from his personal collection.

Its title comes from the Heart Sutra, the Buddhist text whose famous proposition that “form is emptiness” provides a philosophical framework for his longstanding exploration of the tension between appearance and reality.

For SAM, private-sector support helps make exhibitions of this ambition possible. Eugene Tan, the museum’s CEO and director, says such partnerships allow it to “realise ambitious exhibitions and bring significant artistic practices into dialogue with the public”.

For Standard Chartered, supporting the exhibition simply extends a familiar idea into new territory: using shared experiences to deepen its relationships with clients and the wider community. 

Art may be a different arena, but it extends the bank’s same long-running effort to connect with Singapore in meaningful ways.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Form Is Emptiness runs at Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark until Oct 11. Admission is free for all visitors from Oct 5 to 11.