Image: Singapore Art Museum
Singapore Art Museum will open ‘Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage’ on 24 July 2026, presenting the first monographic exhibition of the acclaimed artist at a Singapore museum. The show runs until 22 November 2026 at Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, with the museum describing it as a presentation that foregrounds Taniguchi’s sustained engagement with repetition, time and labour across painting, sculpture and video.
The exhibition takes its title from the visual sensation that lingers in the eye after looking at an image, a fitting frame for a body of work built around accumulation and duration. According to the museum, ‘Afterimage’ is anchored by Taniguchi’s ‘brick paintings’ (2008–ongoing), made by individually filling hand-drawn rectangular cells. The subtle shifts in colour across these works record the days, weeks or months devoted to each canvas, and the museum notes that the untitled, unnumbered paintings are best understood as parts of a single artwork that grows with each new piece.
The exhibition also includes a new version of ‘Runaways’, a series of wooden sculptures composed of straight lines and circles that function as three-dimensional drawings in the gallery. The museum says the sculptures are carved from the wood of Java plum trees, known in the Philippines as duhat, and carry personal associations connected to the artist’s mother. The presentation places these works alongside four video works made between 2010 and 2026.
Among the videos is a newly commissioned work, ‘A painter, if black were a place’ (2026), which the museum says juxtaposes pixelated digital photographs with fields of black painted by Taniguchi. The film inserts her painterly approach alongside images of her mother’s home, garden and symbolic paintings. Together, the videos use the camera and the screen to suggest limited views of history, memory, labour and the legacy of modernism.
Taniguchi, born in 1981 in Dumaguete City and based in Manila, works across painting, video, sculpture, pottery, printmaking, drawing and writing, according to the museum’s exhibition text. It identifies labour, repetition and temporality as central concerns in her practice, and says her works invite audiences to experience material culture sensorially in relation to time, space, labour and technology. Her international exhibition history listed by SAM includes the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, the Gwangju Biennale in 2018, the Biennale of Sydney in 2018 and the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane in 2015.
The exhibition is on view in Level 3, Gallery 3, and general admission is free for Singaporeans and permanent residents. SAM has also scheduled related programmes around the opening, including ‘In Focus with Afterimage: Maria Taniguchi in Conversation with Patrick Flores’ on 25 July, moderated by exhibition curator Haeju Kim, and an artist and curator-led tour the same afternoon. The museum also lists curator tours on 3 October, with Singapore Sign Language interpretation, and 21 November.
