For the first time, Singapore Art Museum has given its solo spotlight to a Filipino. Maria Taniguchi, born in Dumaguete and based in Manila, now fills the galleries at Tanjong Pagar Distripark with canvases you can lose an hour inside. The show is called Afterimage. It opened on 24 July and runs until 22 November 2026.
Most of us came to Singapore to work, to send padala, to build something for the family back home. Art can feel like a luxury for people with lighter schedules. This one is worth the detour. A Kabayan's work hanging in a national museum, in the same city where you clock in every day, hits a different nerve.
Who is Maria Taniguchi
She was born in 1981 in Dumaguete City, in Negros Oriental. In 2015 she won the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award, one of the biggest prizes in Asian contemporary art. Her paintings have traveled to the Venice Biennale in 2024, the Gwangju Biennale, and the Biennale of Sydney. The art world already knows her name. Now that same work sits a short MRT ride from Chinatown, and you can see it without a plane ticket or a gallery membership.
What you will see
The show is built around her brick paintings, which she has made since 2008. Each canvas is covered in thousands of small rectangles, drawn and then filled by hand, one cell at a time. Stand close and you see the hours in it. Step back and the surface shifts, like a brick wall, or a screen of code, or a building you have walked past a hundred times without looking up.
There is also a new version of her Runaways sculptures, built for this space, and four video works made between 2010 and 2026. The title points at the picture that lingers in your eye after you look away. Taniguchi keeps returning to the same ideas: repetition, time, and the plain work of making something.
If you have ever done the same task ten thousand times, on a hospital ward, in a kitchen, on a worksite, her paintings will feel familiar. She turns patience into the whole point. That is a language a lot of us already speak.
How to visit
Singapore Art Museum sits at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, 39 Keppel Road, #01-02. It opens daily from 10am to 7pm. Take the MRT to Tanjong Pagar or Cantonment and walk over, or hop on the museum shuttle. Check SAM's website for the shuttle timing and the latest ticket details before you head down, since prices differ for residents and visitors.
Weekends draw a crowd, so a weekday off or an early Saturday gives you more room and quiet. Bring the kids, because the brick paintings are easy to talk about with anyone, at any age. Bring a Singaporean friend too, and point at a name from home on the museum wall.
Give yourself an hour at least. The work rewards slow looking, and rushing through it misses the whole idea. Nearby you have the food and coffee around Tanjong Pagar for after, so you can make a proper afternoon of it.
Make it happen
Put it on the calendar this month. The show closes on 22 November, which sounds far off until three paydays slip by and you realize you never went. Screenshot the address, pick a free afternoon, and go stand in front of a wall that a woman from Dumaguete turned into art the whole city came to see. Then send the photo to your family back home, and tell them where you were.
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