Visualizing the Void: Singapore Art Museum Explores Five Decades of Hiroshi Sugimoto

Titled ‘Form Is Emptiness,’ this extensive survey exhibition features over 60 multidisciplinary works examining time and perception.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Form Is Emptiness, marks the internationally acclaimed Japanese artist’s first major survey exhibition in Southeast Asia. Born in Tokyo in 1948, Sugimoto is a multidisciplinary artist whose five-decade practice spans photography, sculpture, installation, and spatial design, continuously exploring the nature of time, perception, and human consciousness. Running from May 29 to October 4, 2026, at Singapore Art Museum (SAM) at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, the exhibition brings together over 60 works across 11 series, alongside 14 rare fossil specimens from his personal collection.

Deeply informed by Buddhist philosophy, the core of the exhibition draws from the Heart Sutra and its proposition that “form is emptiness”, suggesting that what appears tangible is contingent and shaped by conditions and perception rather than inherent permanence. Designed by Sugimoto himself, the exhibition space unfolds as a mandala, a geometric representation of the universe in Buddhist and Hindu traditions. This deliberate layout guides visitors through interconnected paths that mirror the cyclical rhythms of nature and life, offering a meditative environment to engage with the tension between presence, absence, and the material world.

The survey showcases several of Sugimoto’s most iconic series, including Seascapes, an ongoing project since 1980 that distills the world into an elemental balance of sea and sky through perfectly centered horizon lines. In his celebrated Theaters series, Sugimoto uses long-exposure photography to compress the entire duration of a film into a single luminous, glowing frame, drawing a parallel between the lifespan of a film and human existence. Furthermore, the Opticks series revisits Isaac Newton’s experiments, exploring the subtle gradations of colour inherent within white light, dissolving form into immersive fields of colour and interrogating the very basis of seeing.

Beyond his traditional camera work, the exhibition features highly anticipated new work on view for the first time such as Spacescape (2024), a folding screen depicting the Earth and Moon in orbit, developed in collaboration with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the University of Tokyo, and Sony. Audiences can also experience Brush Impression, Heart Sutra (2023), a monumental installation of 288 gelatine silver prints created by “writing” the sutra on photographic paper with fixer in near-darkness. These works are complemented by his first video work, Accelerated Buddha (1997-2017) and a selection of fossil specimens, which Sugimoto considers “pre-photography time-recording devices”, further expanding his inquiry into time far beyond the limits of human experience.

Tickets are available via the dedicated webpage for the exhibition here.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Form Is Emptiness
Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark,
39 Keppel Rd, #01-02, Singapore 089065