Tanoto Art Foundation Opens Inaugural Exhibition in Singapore

A former 1960s girls’ high school assembly hall may not be the first place you expect to find contemporary art in Singapore. For collector Belinda Tanoto, however, it was the ideal pop-up venue for the inaugural exhibition of her recently formed Tanoto Art Foundation (TAF).

“We purposely picked a place that is not an intimidating white cube,” Tanoto told ARTnews of the heritage site, now part of a lifestyle complex filled with restaurants in the city-state’s residential River Valley neighborhood. “Removing barriers to accessing art is very important for us.”

Tanoto, the daughter of Indonesian billionaire and natural resources industrialist Sukanto Tanoto, established TAF just over a year ago with the intention of nurturing the burgeoning art scene in Southeast Asia as well as cultivating transnational dialogue. “We wanted to be a new kind of art organization, something that’s a bit nimbler, continues to evolve, and continues to grow with our community,” the Singapore-based collector said. “For now, it’s a privilege not to have a permanent space. We have the flexibility to test and experiment with different formats.”

On view through March 1 at the New Bahru School Hall, the exhibition, titled “Rituals of Perception,” delves into ideas of materiality amid our rapidly accelerating digital era. It brings together more than 50 works by 23 artists, primarily from the Global South. “The show came to life through a year-long process of research,” said TAF artistic director Xiaoyu Weng. That research included a 2025 symposium called “Soul Song of a New Organisation,” a mix of performances and lectures that posed the question of “how to create and nurture an organization with a soul,” as well as a series of talks held in Hong Kong, São Paulo, and Singapore, featuring artists such as Lotus L. Kang and Heidi Lau, whose works appear in the exhibition.

Weng explained that beyond simply displaying a diversity of material practices, the show explores hands-on practices that reclaim time, memory, and embodied knowledge. Tactile works made from clay, cement, paper, and silk threads are placed in conversation with technology-based works using AI, 3D videography, 3D printing, and robotics. Korean American artist Anicka Yi’s futuristic kelp sculptures filled with animatronic insects, for instance, are juxtaposed against iridescent cosmological paintings by young Chinese artist Pan Caoyuan made of mother-of-pearl and lacquer.

The focus on materiality draws on Tanoto’s on predilection for collecting process-driven works. More than half of the works in “Rituals of Perception” are from Tanoto’s collection, alongside a handful of loans and three new commissions. Rather than concentrating on Southeast Asian artists based in the region, Weng chose to foreground diasporic artists such as Berlin-based Filipina Canadian artist Stephanie Comilang and London-based artist Sriwhana Spong, who is of Balinese and Pākehā descent.

The show opens with a new commission by Hong Kong–based artist Tsang Kin-wah. Unfurling beside a staircase, the site-specific installation, titled THE E PLE AND THE P O LE ALONE (2026), is a play on a quotation from Mao Zedong: “The People and the People alone.” Composed of black vinyl wall text inspired by political and philosophical statements, the work encourages individual agency and free thought. While Tsang’s practice typically favors neatly placed letters, here the text deliberately devolves into a crumpled mess, suggesting shattered ideals and the collapse of dreams.

Another new commission is Trisha Baga’s 3D stereoscopic single-channel video MORE (2025), which immerses viewers in a jumble of nebulous deep sea scenes, evocative tunnel imagery, outer space voyages, and drifting baby-care paraphernalia. “It’s about a baby inside the womb who is looking at the world outside that is very confusing—everything is like a collage,” Weng said. “In some senses, technology is like this, surrounding us as humans, and we’re all like babies, being influenced, changed, and controlled.”

Nearby sits Argentine artist Carolina Fusilier’s whimsical sci-fi installation Las Immortalistas V (2025), which also explores technology’s hold over society through an animist lens. The work consists of an oil painting of a luminous pool set within a thick silver structure made of Styrofoam and papier-mâché. Aluminum tubing leads to a painting of a circuit board with a dead beetle perched above, suggesting a surreal machine-like structure somehow powered by the insect.  

Meanwhile, several artists from mainland China tackle socio-political issues, such as Tong Wenmin, who is part of a new wave of Chinese performance artists. She explores humanity’s relationship with nature through her evocative performances, including Flicking (2022), in which the artist is suspended upside down by a crane attached to an uprooted tree that sweeps the ground, and Wave (2019), where she submits to being tossed mercilessly by a strong tide.

Such an ambitious, privately initiated exhibition is rare in Singapore, where the contemporary art landscape has largely been constructed from the top down by the government. While shows organized by artists, foundations, and independent spaces are commonplace in other parts of the world, including in Southeast Asia, that inclination is not yet commonplace in Singapore.

Tanoto said that unlike in other parts of the world where there is a culture of visiting museums and galleries to see contemporary art, this is still a relatively new concept in Southeast Asia, making education a key part of TAF’s mission.

In the future, Tanoto plans to open a permanent space, but in the meantime, TAF will continue to stage a major project annually, primarily timed to Singapore Art Week in January. “We’re trying to make the Southeast Asian art ecosystem more vibrant. It’s so normal in Europe or New York, China or Korea, but initiatives like this are still new here,” she said. “The audience is relatively young in Southeast Asia, and we want to offer art as an alternative to going to the mall on the weekends.”