There is a temptation to describe Maria Taniguchi’s work as meditative. For nearly two decades, the Filipino artist has devoted herself to painting what appears, at first glance, to be the same image: vast fields of carefully hand-painted rectangles, meticulously built one brushstroke at a time until they resemble endless brick walls. Their monumental scale, subdued palettes and rigorous repetition have often led viewers to locate her practice within the legacies of Minimalism or conceptual art, reading the paintings as exercises in formal restraint or quiet contemplation.

Taniguchi, however, gently resists such characterisations. In conversation at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), she laughs when asked whether she considered herself a particularly meditative person. “Not really,” she replies without hesitation. The answer was disarming precisely because it ran counter to the mythology that often surrounds her work. Rather than speaking about transcendence or stillness, Taniguchi consistently returned to more grounded concerns: material, process, responsibility and the gradual accumulation of decisions. “There is an intuitive part,” she reflected, “and there is also this part where you have to take responsibility for what it is that you are doing and the choices that you are making.”

Taniguchi is not an artist inclined towards grand declarations. Throughout the conversation, she speaks slowly, pausing often before answering, weighing each sentence with the same care that characterises her work. She rarely volunteers more than is necessary, never rushing to fill silences or embellish an idea for effect. Instead, she listens closely, considers the question, and responds with a precision that feels almost architectural. Her composure is striking, not distant or aloof, but deeply attentive. Watching her speak, it becomes difficult not to recognise the same qualities that animate her paintings: restraint without coldness, discipline without rigidity, and an extraordinary trust that meaning can emerge through careful accumulation rather than emphatic statement.

It is unsurprising, then, that Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage feels like a quiet exhibition that slowly draws you in and earns it. Like its maker, the works seem content to speak for themselves.The exhibition marks Taniguchi’s first monographic museum exhibition in Singapore and the most comprehensive presentation of her practice in the country to date. Bringing together nearly two decades of paintings, sculpture and moving image, the exhibition arrives at an important moment in Taniguchi’s career, following her major survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) Manila in 2024 and shortly after her participation in the 60th Venice Biennale.

Yet Afterimage does not read as a conventional retrospective, nor does it attempt to chart an artistic evolution through chronology. Instead, curator Duncan Bass and exhibition curator Haeju Kim have organised the exhibition around a series of recurring ideas that have persisted across Taniguchi’s practice since the late 2000s: labour, repetition, memory, materiality and the relationship between bodies and space. Whether expressed through painting, sculpture or film, each work appears less as an isolated object than as another iteration of an ongoing conversation. As Bass remarked during the curatorial walkthrough, the exhibition offers visitors “a wonderful opportunity to look at Maria’s diverse practice over two decades as a whole,” recognising that the different media are ultimately “connected with one another” through shared concerns rather than separated by discipline.

Even the exhibition’s title suggests that meaning will not be immediate. In ophthalmology, an afterimage refers to the visual impression that lingers after the original object has disappeared from view, a phenomenon produced by the retina’s continued response to light. Taniguchi was drawn to the scientific specificity of the term, but also to its wider poetic possibilities. Speaking to journalists during the walkthrough, she explained that an afterimage could refer not only to “the sensation you might have while you are looking at the artwork in this gallery,” but equally to “the impressions that you might have after looking at this gallery.”

Rather than fixing the title to a single interpretation, she deliberately left it open. “I also started to imagine that the image has something,” she reflected, “maybe something shaped by past experiences, or the past stories and the influences that have resonated with these practices. So we opened this title to guide you as you visit the exhibition, instead of having it as a simple meaning.” The observation is quietly revealing. Like the paintings themselves, the title resists closure. It proposes that seeing is never complete in the moment of looking; perception continues to unfold through memory, association and reflection long after one has left the gallery.

That proposition also shapes the exhibition’s physical journey. Visitors expecting to be greeted by Taniguchi’s celebrated brick paintings instead find themselves immersed in moving images. It is a subtle but significant curatorial gesture. “People often know Maria through the brick paintings,” Bass acknowledged, “so beginning with the videos may come as a surprise.” Yet the decision is less an attempt to overturn expectations than to establish the conceptual grammar through which the paintings should later be understood. Before repetition appears in paint, it is encountered through rhythm, duration and sound. Before labour materialises as thousands of hand-painted rectangles, it is experienced through the repetitive impact of tools striking earth or the relentless tempo of a metronome. Rather than functioning as documentary introductions, the four films reveal that Taniguchi has been thinking through the same questions across different media for years. Seen together, they suggest that painting, sculpture and moving image are not distinct strands of her practice but parallel methods for investigating how time becomes visible through material processes.

The first work, Figure Study (2012), introduces these concerns with remarkable restraint. Shot in black and white in the Visayas region of the Philippines, the film observes two workers extracting clay from the earth, filling white sacks through an unbroken sequence of digging, lifting and carrying. There is no narration to explain their activity, no attempt to elevate manual labour into spectacle, and no dramatic narrative beyond the repetition of the task itself. Instead, Taniguchi allows the physical rhythms of work to dictate the structure of the film. The irregular sounds of metal striking soil replace conventional musical scoring, producing what Bass described as “perhaps the most literal form of labour” anywhere in the exhibition.

Yet the film’s significance extends beyond its documentary subject. The clay removed from the ground quietly becomes one of Afterimage‘s recurring materials, resurfacing in later works as both sculptural medium and symbolic thread. Already, the exhibition begins to establish relationships that are not immediately obvious. Rather than treating individual works as self-contained objects, it asks viewers to follow the movement of materials, gestures and ideas across different forms, allowing meaning to accumulate gradually through repetition.

That same logic continues in Figure Study (2018), although the emphasis shifts decisively from observation to making. The workers disappear; in their place are the artist’s own hands, framed so tightly that the body is reduced to gestures of touch, pressure and rotation. Deeply saturated reds and blues replace the monochrome palette of the earlier film, but the camera remains equally resistant to completeness. A sequence of still images documents wet clay being shaped, each frame dwelling on minute physical transformations before giving way to the next. Only later does the camera slowly track the finished sculptural form, yet even here Taniguchi refuses to reveal it in its entirety. The object continually exceeds the frame, frustrating any desire for immediate comprehension.

During the walkthrough, Bass suggested that this emphasis on process over completed form recalls Taniguchi’s formative education at the Philippine High School for the Arts, where students were encouraged to experiment with materials without predetermined outcomes. That pedagogical experience continues to shape her thinking today. Rather than approaching materials as passive substances to be controlled, Taniguchi allows them to guide the development of the work, balancing intuition against deliberation. As she reflected during our interview, artistic practice requires both openness and accountability: “There is an intuitive part… and there is also this part where you have to take responsibility for what it is that you are doing.” In Figure Study (2018), that philosophy is finally tangible. What viewers witness goes beyond simply the making of a sculpture and becomes the slow negotiation between material, hand and time, a negotiation that will later find its most sustained expression in the painted surfaces for which Taniguchi is best known.

As Figure Study explores labour through the body, Mies 421 (2010) turns its attention towards architecture, although architecture is never quite its true subject. The four-minute film documents Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s Barcelona Pavilion through a succession of black-and-white still photographs that isolate fragments of the building: polished marble surfaces, sheets of glass, steel columns, sharp corners and fleeting reflections. The iconic modernist structure is never presented in its entirety. Instead, Taniguchi repeatedly interrupts the viewer’s desire for an establishing view, allowing only partial glimpses to emerge before they disappear again beneath the accelerating rhythm of a metronome.

The device is deceptively simple. As the mechanical ticking gathers speed, the still images begin to accumulate a quiet psychological tension, transforming what might otherwise have been a straightforward architectural study into a meditation on perception itself. The Pavilion, arguably one of the twentieth century’s defining monuments of architectural Minimalism, centres on the act of looking at it. What interests Taniguchi is not the building itself as an object but the impossibility of ever fully apprehending it through fragments.

During the walkthrough, Bass offered an observation that unlocks the logic of all four videos. Taniguchi, he explained, thinks of each still photograph not merely as an image but as an object occupying time, while the brief intervals of black between images function as a form of “negative space”. The description borrows directly from the language of sculpture and drawing, collapsing distinctions between cinema, painting and architecture. Suddenly, the films cease to behave like conventional moving images. Rather than relying on continuous motion, they are structured through a series of discrete units whose meaning emerges only through accumulation.

The black intervals become as significant as the photographs themselves, much as the spaces surrounding a sculpture shape the viewer’s experience of form, or the unpainted edge of a canvas determines the rhythm of a composition. In retrospect, Mies 421 is a lesson in how Taniguchi thinks across media. Every work in Afterimage, whether painted, carved or filmed, is built from repeated fragments whose relationships can only be understood over time.

This way of thinking also complicates the frequent comparisons drawn between Taniguchi and the history of post-war Minimalism. At first encounter, the formal affinities appear obvious. Her repeated grids, restrained palette and geometric vocabulary inevitably recall artists such as Agnes Martin, Donald Judd or Sol LeWitt, while Mies 421 explicitly references one of modernism’s canonical buildings. Yet the similarities begin to dissolve under sustained attention.

Minimalism often aspired towards industrial precision and a degree of objective neutrality, deliberately suppressing evidence of individual authorship in favour of serial systems and manufactured forms. Taniguchi borrows aspects of that visual language but redirects them towards something altogether more intimate. Repetition in her work never erases the body that produces it. Instead, it records the persistence of that body over time. Every brushstroke, every carved joint, every hand-shaped piece of clay quietly insists upon labour as a lived experience rather than an abstract system. Geometry, in Taniguchi’s hands, becomes the language of endurance.

By the time visitors leave the gallery of moving images, they have therefore already encountered many of the conceptual concerns that underpin the exhibition’s most recognisable works. They have seen labour enacted through physical effort, observed repetition functioning as temporal structure, and experienced fragmentation as a mode of perception. Only then do Taniguchi’s monumental brick paintings begin to appear. The sequencing proves remarkably effective. Rather than encountering the canvases as static objects, viewers arrive already sensitised to rhythm, duration and accumulation. This allows the paintings to no longer present themselves as images to be deciphered, and instead are viewed as material records of time, extending the same investigations that have quietly unfolded across the films.

Although they have become the defining body of work within Taniguchi’s practice, the artist has consistently resisted allowing the so-called “brick paintings” to exist as autonomous masterpieces. Starting in 2008 and continuing to the present, the series remains entirely untitled and unnumbered, an insistence that each canvas should be understood not as a complete work in itself but as one fragment within a single, continuously expanding project.

Haeju Kim described this during the walkthrough as “one continuous work that keeps growing as she makes more and adds more paintings to the series.” The distinction is subtle but profound. Museums, collectors and exhibitions inevitably isolate individual canvases, assigning dates, dimensions and ownership to each. Taniguchi’s refusal to name or number them quietly resists this logic of categorisation. Every painting belongs to a larger process that cannot be neatly divided into discrete chapters. The work, in effect, always exceeds the exhibition.

The paintings themselves reward a similarly patient form of looking. From a distance, they appear almost mechanically regular: orderly rows of hand-drawn rectangles extending across vast canvases whose proportions often approach the scale of architecture. It is easy to mistake them for industrially produced surfaces or digitally generated patterns. Yet proximity dissolves that illusion. Every rectangle has first been drawn in pencil before being individually painted by hand, one after another, over days, weeks and sometimes months.

Close observation reveals minute variations that disappear from afar: a barely perceptible shift in pigment, the soft drag of a brush across the canvas, a faint inconsistency in the width of a painted edge, subtle changes in the density of black or grey. During the walkthrough, Kim encouraged visitors to approach the works closely, noting that “no two rectangles are exactly the same.” These differences, she explained, are not imperfections to be overlooked but traces of “the time and the labour of making it and the concentration that is directly connected to this painting.” Repetition, paradoxically, sharpens rather than dulls perception. It slows the eye sufficiently for difference to emerge from apparent sameness.

This shift in perception perhaps constitutes the exhibition’s greatest achievement. Contemporary spectatorship is increasingly conditioned by speed, encouraging viewers to extract meaning almost instantaneously before moving on to the next image. Taniguchi’s paintings quietly refuse such consumption. Their apparent simplicity initially offers very little to hold onto, yet the longer one remains with them, the more unstable they become. Rhythms begin to emerge between neighbouring canvases. Tonal variations accumulate into distinct personalities. Scale alters bodily perception as much as visual perception, particularly where monumental horizontal works seem to stretch beyond the limits of ordinary vision. Looking becomes less an act of recognition than one of sustained attention. Rather than asking what the paintings represent, Taniguchi asks something more demanding: how long are we willing to remain with them before they begin to reveal themselves?

The installation itself reinforces this proposition. Rather than hanging the canvases conventionally, many are leaned directly against the gallery walls, a gesture that immediately unsettles the distinction between painting and object. Kim observed that this arrangement emphasises that the works are “not only an image, but they also occupy a space.” Freed from the wall as purely pictorial surfaces, the paintings begin to behave almost architecturally, asserting their physical weight while simultaneously preparing the transition towards the sculptural works that occupy the centre of the gallery.

Here again, Taniguchi dissolves disciplinary boundaries. The paintings are no longer simply paintings; they become structures, spatial markers and material presences that alter how the body moves through the exhibition. Seen in relation to Mies 421, the connection becomes unmistakable. Both the Barcelona Pavilion and the brick paintings are ultimately less about images than about how space is experienced through repetition, proportion and movement.

The transition from painting to sculpture in Afterimage is almost imperceptible. As the leaned canvases begin to assert themselves as physical objects rather than images alone, the visitor’s attention is gradually drawn towards Runaways (2026), a constellation of towering wooden structures installed throughout the centre of the gallery. It is tempting to understand the sculptures as a departure from the paintings, but they are perhaps better read as an extension of the same questions into three-dimensional space.

Where the brick paintings ask how repetition might register the passage of time, Runaways asks what happens when repetition begins to organise movement itself. Instead of directing the eye across a painted surface, the sculptures choreograph the body through architecture. Their sparse vocabulary: straight lines intersecting with circles, appears almost impossibly economical, yet the permutations generated by these elementary forms seem inexhaustible. As Bass remarked during the walkthrough, Taniguchi does not think of architecture or sculpture as isolated objects to be viewed from a fixed position, but as structures that reshape the experience of moving through space. The sculptures therefore never present themselves all at once. Every step through the gallery produces a different composition as painted surfaces, wooden forms and moving images continuously overlap, separate and recombine.

This emphasis on movement explains why the sculptures resist functioning as autonomous objects. Unlike traditional sculpture, which often invites viewers to circulate around a stable form, Runaways actively reorganises the architecture of the gallery itself. Several of the works were produced specifically for SAM, their dimensions and placements responding to the proportions of Gallery 3. Curiously, they produce space rather than occupying it. Kim noted that the sculptures “gently guide you where to go,” continuously changing “what you see” while creating “new frames, new relationships and new stories” from different viewpoints.

Her observation recalls the experience of walking through Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, where walls, reflections and carefully framed openings continually reshape perception without ever imposing a single route. Seen in this light, Runaways extends the architectural thinking introduced in Mies 421, translating cinematic framing into physical movement. The gallery itself becomes a kind of camera, with the visitor’s body performing the slow edits that the earlier films achieved through sequences of still images.

The sculptures’ apparent formal austerity also conceals a deeply personal history. Constructed from duhat wood (the timber of the Java plum tree) they emerge from one of the exhibition’s most intimate stories. During the walkthrough, Kim explained that Taniguchi’s mother planted the tree while pregnant with the artist, making the material itself inseparable from familial memory. The anecdote fundamentally alters the sculptures’ relationship to Minimalism. Their geometric language may initially evoke the industrial clarity associated with artists such as Judd or Carl Andre, yet every element of Runaways quietly resists the detachment that characterised much twentieth-century abstraction.

Rather than fabricated from steel or aluminium, the sculptures are painstakingly hand-carved, their joints bearing subtle evidence of craftsmanship and manual labour. The wood itself carries the memory of a living organism, while its selection is rooted in biography rather than formal necessity. Even the deep violet fruit of the duhat tree echoes the dark tonalities that recur throughout Taniguchi’s paintings. What initially appears as a universal language of geometry gradually reveals itself to be grounded in family history, regional material culture and lived experience. It is a reminder that abstraction need not erase personal narrative; it can instead become another way of carrying it.

This tension between systematic order and individual memory runs throughout Taniguchi’s practice. During the conversation, she spoke repeatedly about balancing intuition with responsibility, suggesting that every material decision carries conceptual as well as ethical weight. That perspective offers an important corrective to readings that frame her work primarily through the lens of endurance or discipline. Certainly, the physical labour required to produce the paintings and sculptures is immense, but the works are never simply demonstrations of patience.

Instead, repetition functions as a methodology through which materials gradually disclose their own possibilities. The binary logic invoked by Runaways, Kim compared the sculptures’ circles and lines to the digits zero and one—does not produce rigid uniformity but astonishing openness. From the simplest formal vocabulary emerges an almost limitless range of spatial relationships. The same principle governs the brick paintings, where identical rectangles continually generate subtle differences in rhythm, scale and tone. Repetition, for Taniguchi, is therefore never the opposite of variation. It is the condition that allows variation to become perceptible.

The exhibition’s final work, A painter, if black were a place (2026), gathers these various strands together with remarkable quietness. Commissioned by SAM specifically for Afterimage, the short film mirrors the formal structure of Mies 421, once again presenting a measured sequence of still images interrupted by intervals of black. Yet the emotional register could hardly be more different. Where Mies 421 examined the cool surfaces of one of modernism’s defining architectural icons, A painter, if black were a place turns inward, returning to Taniguchi’s hometown of Dumaguete City and, more specifically, to her mother’s home, studio and garden.

The images are intimate without becoming confessional: terracotta sculptures scattered among foliage, fragments of domestic interiors and paintings by Christina “Kitty” Taniguchi appear through tightly cropped, low-resolution digital photographs whose visible pixelation immediately situates them within the visual language of memory. During the walkthrough, Bass suggested that the degraded image quality functions almost as a metaphor for recollection itself. Details blur, edges soften and certainty begins to dissolve. Rather than presenting the past with documentary clarity, the film acknowledges memory as something continually reconstructed through fragments, associations and omissions.

The film also completes one of the exhibition’s most elegant material cycles. The clay first encountered in Figure Study (2012), excavated from the earth through physical labour, quietly returns here in the terracotta vessels that populate Kitty Taniguchi’s garden. Family history reappears through the paintings hanging inside the house, while the duhat tree that gave rise to Runaways remains present as an unseen but deeply felt point of origin. Nothing is stated explicitly. Instead, Afterimage allows connections to emerge gradually as viewers carry earlier works with them into later ones. Even the recurring black screens reveal themselves, upon closer inspection, not as empty absences but as carefully hand-painted monochromes whose subtle tonal shifts recall the surfaces of Taniguchi’s brick paintings. What initially appears to be nothing becomes another site of labour. Black, like repetition itself, refuses neutrality.

It is perhaps here that the exhibition’s title finally reveals its full significance. An afterimage is not simply what remains after looking; it is also the accumulation of everything that has been seen before. By the final gallery, no work stands alone. Every image recalls another image, every material carries the memory of a previous encounter, and every formal decision echoes something glimpsed elsewhere in the exhibition. The experience becomes cumulative rather than sequential. Instead of progressing from one artwork to the next, visitors begin moving through an increasingly dense network of visual and conceptual relationships in which painting, sculpture and moving image continually illuminate one another. The exhibition does not ask viewers to decode hidden meanings so much as to trust that understanding, like memory itself, will emerge slowly through sustained attention.

One of the most revealing moments during our conversation arrives almost casually. When asked whether, after nearly twenty years of making the brick paintings, Taniguchi still surprises herself, she pauses before answering: “I think that’s why I keep doing them.”

The paintings have never been about arriving at a perfected formula. Instead, they exist because repetition continually produces difference. Every canvas begins from the same premise: a grid of hand-drawn rectangles, each individually painted. But each becomes something else through the countless small decisions made over weeks or months of work. Colour shifts. Scale changes. Brushstrokes loosen or tighten. Rhythms accelerate or slow. What appears identical is never actually the same.

That idea extends beyond the paintings. Runaways demonstrates how a handful of basic forms can generate endlessly changing spatial relationships. The films repeatedly return to still images, interrupted by moments of absence, yet every sequence accumulates new emotional weight. Even the exhibition itself is built upon recurrence: clay moves from the Philippine jungle to the artist’s hands to terracotta vessels in her mother’s garden; architectural fragments reappear as painted grids; personal memory quietly reshapes the supposedly impersonal language of Minimalism. Nothing is repeated simply for repetition’s sake, and each return becomes another way of asking the same question.

Throughout Afterimage, Taniguchi resists the contemporary pressure for artworks to immediately explain themselves. There are no dramatic revelations waiting around the corner, no singular interpretive key that unlocks the exhibition. Instead, understanding arrives incrementally, almost imperceptibly, through sustained looking. The more time one spends moving between the paintings, sculptures and films, the more each work begins to illuminate another.

It becomes clear, for instance, that the black screens in A painter, if black were a place are not interruptions but paintings. That the gaps between still photographs in Mies 421 function much like the spaces between painted rectangles. That the leaning canvases are not merely installed differently but fundamentally question where painting ends and sculpture begins. That the towering wooden forms of Runaways are simultaneously drawings, sculptures, architectural interventions and repositories of family history.

The exhibition rewards this kind of slow accumulation because Taniguchi herself works through accumulation. Her practice is less concerned with producing singular masterpieces than with building a body of work that continues to evolve over decades. The brick paintings remain untitled and unnumbered precisely because she considers them parts of one ongoing work rather than discrete objects. Every new painting extends the conversation rather than concludes it.

Perhaps this is why she speaks so often about responsibility. “There is an intuitive part,” she says when describing how she chooses materials or decides what form a work should take. “And there is also this part where you have to take responsibility for what it is that you are doing and the choices that you are making.”

The statement feels significant because it rejects the myth of artistic inspiration arriving fully formed. Taniguchi’s practice is built instead upon commitment: to process, to material, to attention, and to following an idea long enough for it to reveal something unexpected.

That commitment also explains why Afterimage feels unexpectedly hopeful. The exhibition is often described as being about labour, time and repetition. All of that is true. But what ultimately emerges is not exhaustion or endurance. Rather, Taniguchi suggests that repetition is itself a way of producing knowledge. The patient act of making becomes a way of thinking.

When asked what role slow, process-based art can play in a culture increasingly shaped by speed and instant consumption, she gently shifts the conversation away from the language of resistance. “I don’t think a lot about consumption,” she says. Instead, she thinks about “the production of knowledge and intelligence and the creation of systems.”

The brick paintings then are not exercises in patience for their own sake. The sculptures are not simply minimalist forms softened by autobiography. The films are not documentaries of labour or family memory. They are all systems for thinking, frameworks through which knowledge gradually takes material form.

By the time visitors reach the end of the exhibition, they may find themselves looking differently not only at Taniguchi’s works but at the act of looking itself. The title Afterimage refers, in part, to the visual phenomenon whereby an image lingers on the retina after the object has disappeared. Yet Taniguchi seems equally interested in another kind of afterimage: the impressions, memories and associations that continue to unfold long after one has left the gallery.

Those lingering impressions are difficult to summarise because they are less like conclusions than invitations to notice small differences, to recognise the intelligence embedded in manual labour, to understand repetition not as monotony but as possibility. To see that even black is never simply black.

After nearly two decades, Maria Taniguchi’s practice continues to grow in exactly the same way her paintings do: patiently, incrementally, one decision at a time. Afterimage is not simply a retrospective of that journey, nor merely the artist’s first major museum exhibition in Singapore. It is an opportunity to witness a body of work that has remained remarkably consistent in its questions while continually discovering new ways of asking them.

In a cultural moment that rewards speed, certainty and immediate legibility, Taniguchi offers something far rarer: a call for sustained attention. And perhaps that, more than anything else, is the afterimage that remains.

Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage runs from 24th July to 22nd November 2026 at SAM @ Tanjong Pagar Distripark. More information available here