ART EQUITY: PH leads Asia on artists’ resale rights push

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By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Jean-François Millet never got rich from his art. He spent most of his life painting French peasants — their bent backs, their rough hands, their dignity in poverty — and when he died in 1875, his family had little to show for it. Fourteen years later, his most famous work, “The Angelus,” sold at auction for 553,000 francs. Not a centavo went to his heirs.

That story, more than a century old, is still being told in Philippine auction houses.

In 2018, National Artist Jose Joya’s 1959 abstract work “Space Transfiguration” fetched PHP 112 million — the highest price ever recorded for a Filipino artwork. In 2024, Fernando Amorsolo’s “Mango Gatherers” sold for PHP 46 million. Last December, Félix Martínez’s “La Jota Manileña” cleared PHP 39 million. In each case, the resale windfall went to the seller. The artists — or their estates — got nothing.

The Philippines has had a law against exactly this since 1997.

The Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines and the World Intellectual Property Organization convened the Asian Regional Conference on Artists’ Resale Right on June 8 at the Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar in Bagac, Bataan, bringing together policymakers, artists, lawyers, and collective management organizations from across the Asia-Pacific to confront a problem the country has spent nearly three decades failing to solve.

“Resale royalties are about recognizing the continuing contribution of artists to the value of their works,” IPOPHL Director General Teodoro C. Pascua told delegates at the opening. “Ultimately, the debate over artists’ resale rights is about more than percentages and legal frameworks. It is about the kind of creative economy societies want to build.”

The three-day conference — the first of its kind in Asia — aims to produce a regional roadmap for strengthening awareness, administration, and enforcement of Artists’ Resale Right, or ARR, across the region.

A law on the books, a right rarely collected

Section 200 of Republic Act 8293, the IP Code of 1997, is unambiguous: visual artists are entitled to a share of the gross proceeds of every subsequent sale or lease of their original paintings, sculptures, or manuscripts after the first. The right exists. The mechanism to enforce it largely does not.

IPOPHL Deputy Director General Ann Claire Credo-Cabochan acknowledged as much at the conference opening. “Implementation of resale rights across jurisdictions continues to be uneven,” she said, noting that some of the world’s largest art markets — including the United States and China — do not recognize ARR at all, which complicates cross-border collection even where the right is legally established.

In the Philippines, the gap is closer to home. No collective management organization currently administers resale royalty collection on behalf of Filipino visual artists. Galleries and auction houses are not systematically reporting sales to IPOPHL. Artists — particularly those early in their careers, or those whose reputations appreciate only after death — have no practical way to track resales or claim what the law says is theirs.

Rizalee Imao, who attended the conference as a representative of the Imao Estate — managing the legacy of her father-in-law, National Artist Abdulmari Asia Imao — is one of the people that gap directly affects. Her husband, sculptor and [Assistant Professor/Dean — verify title] Abdulmari “Toym” Imao Jr., also participated and spoke on art education reform, a related thread in the broader conversation about whether the Philippines is equipping its artists to understand and exercise their legal rights.

“Rights can only be meaningful when creators understand and are empowered to exercise them,” Credo-Cabochan said.

The money is real

The urgency of that argument becomes clearer against the backdrop of the numbers.

The Philippine creative economy expanded to PHP 2.12 trillion in 2025, up 6.9% from PHP 1.98 trillion the year before, according to data Pascua cited from the Philippine Statistics Authority. The sector now accounts for 7.6% of gross domestic product. Exports of creative goods reached PHP 320.06 billion; creative services exports climbed to PHP 426.99 billion.

Visual arts are identified as a key sector under Republic Act No. 11904, or the Philippine Creative Industries Development Act, signed into law to formalize government support for Filipino creatives.

Yet for most visual artists, the economics remain lopsided. Unlike musicians who earn from streaming, live performances, and licensing, or writers who collect royalties on every book sold, painters and sculptors typically get paid once — when the work first leaves their studio. Everything that happens after that, including resales at auction for multiples of the original price, belongs entirely to whoever holds the work.

“Consider a young artist whose talent and skill allow them to sell their first artwork for a modest sum,” Pascua said in his keynote. “Over time, their work begins to attract more attention. The value of their art steadily rises, including the value of those early pieces. Yet years later, those same works are resold for amounts far beyond their original price, without the artist receiving any share of the returns.”

The conference brought together some of the country’s most prominent artists to put faces to that abstraction. Sculptor Nemesio “Nemi” Miranda Jr., internationally recognized as the father of “Imaginative Figurism” and founder of the Angono Atelier Association, attended alongside fine artist Alberto “Badz” Magsumbol and digital sculptor Megs Empinado, whose work has appeared in projects for Marvel, DC, Capcom, and Hasbro.

Empinado’s presence points to a dimension of the ARR debate that goes beyond traditional auction houses. As art markets move into digital platforms, NFTs, and cross-border online transactions, the practical questions of how resale royalties are tracked, collected, and distributed become exponentially harder. The conference program dedicated a full session — “Resale Right in a Digital Art Market” — to that problem.

A regional fight, an old Philippine law

ARR traces its origins directly to what happened to Millet’s family. France introduced the right, called droit de suite — literally “the right to follow” — in 1920, as a response to exactly the kind of posthumous exploitation the “The Angelus” sale had laid bare. More than 90 countries have since adopted it, including the Philippines.

But adoption and enforcement are different things. The conference is happening, in part, because the region’s record on the latter is poor. Countries with ARR laws on the books lack the institutional infrastructure — registries, CMOs, reporting obligations for auction houses — to make those laws work in practice. Countries without ARR laws, including the two largest art markets in the world, create a natural escape hatch for transactions that artists would otherwise benefit from.

IPOPHL has been working to close that gap through its Malikhaing Pinoy: Wanna Make It Right program, which uses the International Standard Name Identifier to give artists globally recognized identifiers and improve attribution. It has also been collaborating with the Department of Trade and Industry on broader creative industries policy under the PCIDA.

The Bataan conference, timed to the Philippines’ 2026 ASEAN Chairmanship, is an attempt to formalize that momentum into a regional commitment — shared standards, cross-border enforcement mechanisms, and the kind of institutional architecture that would make ARR something artists can actually use.

“Let us continue to work together across borders, across sectors, and across disciplines to build a future where our artists not only create but also prosper,” Pascua said.

Millet would have understood the aspiration. He spent his life painting people who worked hard and were paid little for it, trusting that dignity and labor deserved recognition. He just never imagined the argument would still need making 150 years later.

The Asian Regional Conference on Artists’ Resale Right runs through June 10 at Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar, Bagac, Bataan. (With reports from Janina Lim, IPOPHL Information Officer III)