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.

www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/Art-Events/Exhibitions/Maria-Taniguchi-Afterimage