Singapore Art Museum opens its most ambitious solo exhibition to date this month, presenting Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage — the first monographic museum exhibition in Singapore by the acclaimed Filipino artist. Opening on 24 July 2026 at SAM’s Tanjong Pagar Distripark venue, the show brings together nearly two decades of Taniguchi’s practice and marks a significant moment for contemporary art in the region.
The Artist
Maria Taniguchi is one of Southeast Asia’s most significant contemporary artists, known for a practice that moves fluidly between painting, sculpture, and video. Her work is defined by a rigorous conceptual framework and a quiet, almost meditative intensity — qualities that have earned her international recognition while remaining firmly rooted in the material and the durational.
What to Expect
The exhibition’s centrepiece is Taniguchi’s iconic “brick paintings” — monumental canvases built up through the obsessive, repeated hand-painting of brick-like forms. The process is as important as the outcome: each mark accumulates into something larger, a surface that records time and labour in equal measure.
Alongside the paintings, Afterimage presents a site-specific iteration of her Runaways sculptures — works that extend her investigation of form and repetition into three dimensions. Four video works spanning 2010 to 2026 are also featured, including a newly commissioned piece, A painter, if black were a place, created specifically for this exhibition.
The Title
The name Afterimage is borrowed from a visual phenomenon: the ghost of an image that persists in a viewer’s field of vision after the original stimulus has disappeared. It is an apt metaphor for Taniguchi’s entire practice, where repetition, time, and labour leave their mark not just on the canvas but on the act of looking itself. You don’t simply view her work — it lingers.
Visit
Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage opens on 24 July 2026 at Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Gallery 3, Level 3, 39 Keppel Rd, Singapore 089065. For more information, visit singaporeartmuseum.sg.
