“…the scale and focus of Afterimage invite visitors to slow down and stay with the works long enough for nuance and meaning to unfold.”—Duncan Bass
Duncan Bass, Curator at Singapore Art Museum
CNTRFLD. Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage is the first monographic exhibition of the artist presented by a Singapore museum. From a curatorial perspective, what does an exhibition of this scale and focus make possible for audiences encountering Taniguchi’s practice at SAM?
DB. Presenting Afterimage extends a relationship that SAM has built with Taniguchi’s practice. We previously displayed one of her canvases from the Untitled series as part of Everyday Practices, the inaugural exhibition introducing SAM’s gallery for works from its collection. While audiences may have seen her paintings before, bringing thirteen of these monumental works together highlights subtle variations across their surfaces and traces connections throughout her broader body of work.
As the artist’s first monographic presentation by a Singapore museum, the project frames her work as an interconnected body of thought spanning two decades rather than isolated objects. It places her paintings in sustained dialogue with sculpture and moving image, showing how core themes of materiality, labour, time, and process recur across mediums. For instance, while the “brick paintings” serve as a familiar anchor, seeing thirteen works spanning 2017 to 2026 reveals subtle shifts in tone, texture, scale, and colour that accumulate across the space. What might initially look like a rigid structure discloses itself as an evolving project, continually renewed through repetition.
Ultimately, the scale and focus of Afterimage invite visitors to slow down and stay with the works long enough for nuance and meaning to unfold — mirroring the concept of an “afterimage” in the exhibition’s title, which persists after the initial moment of viewing.
CNTRFLD. Afterimage brings together works made across almost two decades, while the Tanjong Pagar Distripark galleries offer a distinctive architectural environment. How did the space influence the way you brought Taniguchi’s works into dialogue with one another, and what did the site make possible that a more conventional gallery might not?
DB. The scale and industrial character of our galleries at Tanjong Pagar Distripark allowed us to present Taniguchi’s work as an environment to move through.
This was essential for the new iteration of Runaways. Working closely with the artist, we tailored each sculpture's scale and placement to respond directly to the architecture of SAM’s gallery. The sculptures guide our movement through what is otherwise a quite sparse space, continually shifting sightlines and reconfiguring relationships between the sculptures, paintings, and moving image works. In short, they invite new ways of looking at the entire exhibition.
CNTRFLD. Taniguchi’s monumental brick paintings and Runaways sculptures invite audiences to pay attention to scale, material, repetition and the physical act of looking. How did you approach the installation so that visitors could experience both the physical presence of the works and the sustained labour and processes behind them?
DB. Taniguchi’s “brick paintings” clearly illustrate how we approached this balance. Each canvas is built through thousands of small, repeated gestures made over days, weeks and, in some cases, months. From our earliest conversations with the artist, we wanted to present enough of these canvases to convey the dedication evidenced by Taniguchi’s practice and the subtlety that emerges from it. Counterintuitively, the scale and quantity of these paintings reveal the time and artistic labour behind them more powerfully than presenting smaller, individual works. In an exhibition like Afterimage, the days or weeks captured in a single painting extend to years of the artist’s life committed to canvas, and the systematic repetition of her artistic process brings out differences that seemed to increase exponentially with each additional artwork we brought into the gallery.
The physical presence of these paintings has also been key to Taniguchi's work, as she leans her largest canvases against the gallery walls. We read a hanging canvas as a surface or as an image; something flat, fixed, and contained. The simple act of leaning the canvas against the wall fundamentally changes the way we experience the work, transforming the two-dimensional painting into a three-dimensional object. The painting becomes a physical object that occupies the same space as the viewer; it asserts its own presence.
This approach asks visitors to move between two forms of attention. From a distance, the works register as imposing, restrained surfaces; up close, the grid gives way to variation, as no two cells are exactly alike. Repetition therefore does not produce sameness, but sharpens perception, making the artist’s hand and the accumulation of time visible within the work.
CNTRFLD. The exhibition includes a newly commissioned work alongside pieces made at different points in Taniguchi’s career. What did bringing these works together reveal about the development of her practice, and what connections between them became apparent only through the process of curating and installing the exhibition?
DB. I would say that these connections were always present in the work and something that we deliberately intended to bring forth. Because Taniguchi conceives her practice as an evolving process, installing pieces spanning nearly two decades did not create new relationships so much as reveal those that were already there. The works often complement each other, but they also speak in contrast, reinforcing her view of them not as complete, self-contained objects, but as interconnected pieces of a much larger, still unfolding practice.
These connections often emerge through contrast. For example, I read Taniguchi’s “brick paintings” and Runaways sculptures as complementary bodies of work that each helps us better understand the other. If we interpret the gesture of leaning the canvas against the wall as a transformation from two-dimensional image to three-dimensional object, we can similarly read the simple lines and circles of the Runaways sculptures as a line drawing extended into space. Similarly, the deep purple fruit of the Java Plum, referenced in Taniguchi’s choice of material for the sculptures, echoes the palette of several darker Untitled paintings where violet undertones emerge from the seemingly black or grey canvas.
A similar formal interplay emerges across several of Taniguchi’s videos. The metronome's mechanical time in Mies 421 (2010) contrasts with the uneven, human cadence of two workers in Figure Study (2012). The newly commissioned A painter, if black were a place (2026) follows a structural logic similar to Mies 421, the exhibition's earliest video. Both use a sequence of still images that advance at a regular pace, similar to an automatic slide projector, yet their subjects could not be more different—both in terms of image quality and image content. The cold, minimal lines of the Barcelona Pavilion—depicted in black and white in Taniguchi’s 2010 video—give way to warm but pixelated colour images of a tropical garden in the new work. These fuzzy images are punctuated by what appear to be black screens, but they are, in fact, hand-painted surfaces with subtle tonal variations and visible brushstrokes that recall the “brick paintings” installed throughout the gallery.
CNTRFLD. SAM describes its programme as presenting contemporary art from a Southeast Asian perspective. More broadly, what responsibilities and opportunities do you think museums have when presenting artists from the region to audiences who may be less familiar with their work or its cultural and historical contexts?
DB. Presenting an artist such as Taniguchi at SAM allows us to give sustained attention to a significant artist whose practice has developed within Southeast Asia while engaging with visual languages and questions that circulate beyond the region. Curatorially, we also needed to present the work with care: provide enough context for audiences to engage with it, without letting biography, nationality, or geography become the sole lens through which it is understood.
Taniguchi’s work is deeply personal, shaped by family history, material memory and her connection to place. Yet, these elements are often distilled and abstracted beyond immediate recognition, introducing a formal vocabulary that recalls Minimalism or conceptual art while actively challenging these rigid art historical legacies. Afterimage allows these dimensions to coexist. Visitors encounter a practice rooted in specific materials and histories, while also recognising its wider concerns with time, labour, repetition and perception.
For audiences less familiar with Taniguchi or contemporary art from the region, the exhibition offers an entry point, where visitors can encounter the work and let meaning unfold at its own pace. To us, this is one of the museum’s most important roles — to create conditions for sustained encounters with art, rather than prescribing what visitors should take away.
Through our curatorial approach and active engagement with international artists, ideas, and practices, SAM positions Singaporean and regional perspectives as key drivers of global art inquiry. By building long-term relationships with artists — from dedicated solo presentations to major new commissions — we create space for their work to be explored in greater depth and to participate in contemporary art conversations both regionally and globally.
“We do not see Southeast Asia as having a single, unified story. Its artistic practices emerge from different histories, cultural contexts and lived experiences, and we want the collection to reflect that complexity.”—Ong Puay Khim
Ong Puay Khim, Director (Collections, Design and Public Art) at Singapore Art Museum
CNTRFLD. Singapore Art Museum has built a significant public collection of contemporary art from Singapore, Southeast Asia and beyond. What principles guide the development of a collection that reflects the diversity of artistic practices, histories and perspectives across the region, and how do you approach the question of whose stories and practices are represented?
