Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage

Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage is the first monographic exhibition of the acclaimed artist presented by a Singapore museum. Taking its title from visual sensations that linger in a viewer’s field of vision, Afterimage highlights recurring concerns that run through Taniguchi’s practice, including repetition, time, and labour.

The exhibition is anchored by Taniguchi’s “brick paintings” (2008–ongoing), which are made by individually filling hand-drawn rectangular cells. The subtle shifts in colour that accumulate document the days, weeks, or months devoted to each painting reflecting the time and effort required to make them. Untitled and unnumbered, Taniguchi’s “brick paintings” are best understood as individual parts of a single artwork that continues to grow with each new painting.

Alongside these towering canvases, Afterimage presents a new version of Runaways, a series of wooden sculptures made up of straight lines and circles that function as three-dimensional drawings floating in the gallery. Carved from the wood of Java plum trees, known in the Philippines as duhat, the sculptures carry deeply personal associations of the artist’s mother who craved the fruit while pregnant.

Four video works made between 2010–2026 demonstrate the development of Taniguchi’s relationship to space and materials. Key amongst these is a newly commissioned video, A painter, if black were a place (2026), which juxtaposes pixelated digital photos with fields of black painted by Taniguchi, inserting her subtle painterly style alongside images of her mother’s home, garden, and symbolic paintings. Together, these videos deploy the framing device of the camera and the screen to suggest our limited views of history, memory, labour, and the legacy of modernism.

about the artist

Maria Taniguchi (b. 1981, Dumaguete City; lives and works in Manila) works across a diverse range of media, including painting, video, sculpture, pottery, printmaking, drawing and writing. Central to her practice are questions of labour, repetition, and temporality, which she explores through an ongoing engagement with materiality and process. Her works invite audiences to experience material culture sensorially, connecting it to broader notions of time, space, labour and technology.

Taniguchi is the recipient of the 2015 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award. Her work has been featured in major international exhibitions including the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), the Gwangju Biennale (2018), the Biennale of Sydney (2018) and the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2015). Her solo exhibitions include presentations at MCAD Manila (2024) and the Jorge B. Vargas Museum, Quezon City (2011), among others.

related events

check out the line-up of free and ticketed events below!

GUIDED TOUR

Join us on a guided tour and gain insights on artworks presented in Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage.

Artist and Curator-led Tour: Sat, 25 July | 4pm - 5pm
*Meeting Point: Level 3, Gallery 3
Free, by Registration | Register here

Curator Tour
• Sat, 3 Oct (with Singapore Sign Language interpretation) | 3pm - 4pm
• Sat, 21 Nov | 3pm - 4pm
*Meeting Point: Level 3, Gallery 3, SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark

TALK

In Focus with Afterimage: Maria Taniguchi in Conversation with Patrick Flores (Moderated by Haeju Kim)
Sat, 25 July | 2.30pm - 3.30pm
Level 3, The Main Deck, #03-07
Free, by Registration | Register here

resources

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