Singapore Art Museum

I spent my Sunday visiting Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. The Cantonment train station on the circle line just opened beside the museum, so it's very convenient to get there! 

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Form Is Emptiness

This is the artist’s first major survey exhibition in Southeast Asia. The exhibition traces five decades of artistic inquiry and sustained conceptual exploration, drawing from a well-known line in the Heart Sutra, a foundational Buddhist text. The phrase “form is emptiness” articulates a profound yet direct insight: nothing exists independently, and we perceive the world in a certain way because of the definitions we have created for ourselves. The tension between appearance and reality has long been central to Sugimoto’s practice.

Tyrrhenian Sea, Scilla: Sugimoto has photographed his seminal Seascapes across over 250 locations worldwide. Each image follows the same compositional structure: sea and sky meet at a perfectly centred horizon line, with subtle variances in light, weather and atmosphere.

Theatres: This series features empty cinemas illuminated solely by their glowing screens.

Brush Impression, Heart Sutra: A monumental convergence of photography, calligraphy, and spiritual reflection, comprising of 288 unique gelatine silver prints.

Sea of Buddha: Capturing the 1,001 gold-leaf statues of Guanyin, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, the statues are enshrined at the Rengeō-in temple in Kyoto, rebuilt in the 13th century.

Dioramas: What at first seem like spectacular wildlife photographs are, in fact, images of natural history displays. Through careful framing and controlled lighting, Sugimoto transformed stuffed animals and painted backdrops, imitations of life, into images that feel alive. The works reveal the fragile boundary between appearance and reality, and the camera’s power not only to still life but to instill it.

The Living Room
This exhibition explores how museums might collect, care for, and re-present performance-based practices. Like the living room in a home, this exhibition considers what it means to create a space that is private yet shared, settled yet always in flux. More than a metaphor, it becomes a way of being: a model for how an exhibition might gather people, hold ideas, and remain open. Here, The Living Room invites us to think of performance traces not merely as static records, but as elements in a shifting space of encounter and exchange.

Allow me to introduce myself by Azzam Rahman: A performative installation with talcum powder, second-hand furniture and glass bell jars. 

Talking Objects
This exhibition examines the meanings that quotidian objects and everyday representations amass through use and circulation. Casting daily encounters in new light, the artists in the exhibition explore the emotions and value we accord to the material and visual world around us. It encourages us to take a close look at the world we inhabit and seek new ways of seeing, thinking and meaning-making. As we face an entropy of images, information and values, how do we talk with and about objects, and what do objects say of us?

Hungry God by Subodh Gupta: A large cascading pile of pots, pans, buckets and kitchen utensils makes up a shiny, towering sculpture. By using mass-produced stainless-steel utensils that become ubiquitous in everyday life in India, Gupta reflects on the transformation and representations of his homeland and captures the multitudes of definitions and conditions of contemporary India. 

Mang Emo + Mag-himo Grand Piano Project grew out of a cross-cultural collaboration that began in 2005. Reamillo worked with craftsmen from his late father’s now defunct piano-making workshop to create a work that is both sculpture and a functioning musical instrument. 

Third World Extra Virgin Dreams by Suzann Victor: At its centre is a used single bed; the site of beginnings and ends—where human conception, birth and dying take place. The bed performs as host and witness to an individual’s most private moments: sleep, sexual fantasies/fulfilment, dreams and nightmares. 

Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage

This 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.