By Jessica Ye (Jessica Yap)
We first introduced Maria Taniguchi’s Afterimage when Singapore Art Museum announced the exhibition earlier this year. Now that the doors are open, the experience feels less like discovering an artist for the first time and more like being invited into a practice that has been quietly unfolding for nearly two decades.
Because Afterimage is not an exhibition that reveals everything at once.
It asks you to stay.
In a time where most things are designed to be consumed quickly, Taniguchi’s works move at their own pace. The exhibition rewards visitors who take a little longer to look, allowing details that initially seem almost invisible to slowly come forward.
Presented at Gallery 3 of Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Afterimage brings together the Filipino artist’s practice across painting, sculpture and moving image. Rather than focusing on spectacle, the exhibition centres on the quieter forces that have shaped Taniguchi’s work over the years: repetition, time and labour.
At the heart of the exhibition are Taniguchi’s “brick paintings”, the ongoing series that has become one of her most recognisable bodies of work.
From a distance, the large-scale canvases appear almost perfectly structured, filled with rows of hand-drawn rectangular forms. But the closer you get, the more the illusion of uniformity begins to shift. Small variations in colour and texture appear, revealing the countless hours behind each surface.
Each rectangle is painted individually, with some works taking days or weeks to complete. The repetition is not simply a visual language. It is the process itself, turning every mark into a record of time spent.
Rather than treating each canvas as a separate artwork, Taniguchi leaves the paintings untitled and unnumbered, considering them as individual parts of one continuously growing work. Installed leaning against the gallery walls, they exist somewhere between painting, sculpture and architecture, changing depending on where you stand.
That same relationship between material and memory continues through Runaways (2026), Taniguchi’s site-responsive sculptural work created for the exhibition.
Made from duhat wood, the Java plum tree native to the Philippines, the sculptures appear minimal at first glance. Simple circles and lines are arranged through space, almost like drawings brought into three dimensions.
But beneath the restrained forms lies a deeply personal connection. The material carries a memory from Taniguchi’s own family history, linked to her mother Christina “Kitty” Taniguchi, who craved the fruit while pregnant with her. What appears simple becomes layered with personal history, craftsmanship and inherited memory.
The exhibition’s moving-image works extend these ideas further, exploring how images, spaces and memories accumulate over time.
The newly commissioned A painter, if black were a place offers one of the most intimate moments in the exhibition. Built around pixelated photographs from Taniguchi’s hometown of Dumaguete City, the work brings together images of gardens, terracotta sculptures and paintings by her mother. At first, fields of black appear empty. Look closer, and subtle variations emerge, revealing painted surfaces much like Taniguchi’s canvases.
Across the exhibition, Taniguchi repeatedly returns to a simple question: what happens when we pay closer attention?
Her works do not demand immediate reactions. They do not rely on dramatic gestures or overwhelming scale alone. Instead, they create space for observation, allowing meaning to build slowly through repeated encounters.
Perhaps that is why Afterimage feels particularly relevant now.
It reminds us that looking can be an act of patience. That making can be an act of devotion. And that sometimes the most memorable experiences are not the ones that reveal themselves immediately, but the ones that stay with you long after you leave.
Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage is on view from 24 July to 22 November 2026 at Gallery 3, Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Admission is free for Singapore Citizens and Permanent Residents, with general admission charges applying for international visitors.
