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Come stare into the void just for a bit at Singapore Art Museum’s upcoming show, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Form Is Emptiness, running from May 29, 2026 to October 4, 2026.
This is Hiroshi Sugimoto's first major Southeast Asian exhibition, and it's massive. We’re talking 63 works drawn from 11 series across photography, sculpture, installation and architecture, plus 14 fossils from the artist’s personal collection. Spanning five decades, the show maps out a career built on one slightly unnerving question: what exactly are we looking at when we look at anything?
Born in Tokyo in 1948, Sugimoto – artist, photographer, architect – studied at Rikkyo University before heading to the Art Centre College of Design in the 1970s. Today, he splits his time between Tokyo and New York, maintaining a practice that extends far beyond the gallery wall – into writing, calligraphy, garden design, culinary arts, and even directing and producing in the performing arts. If there’s one thing you’ll recognise him for, it’s his iconic photographic series, particularly his seascapes – pared-down, meditative images that distil the horizon into a near-abstract plane – and Theatres, in which entire films are captured in a single long exposure, rendering the screen as a luminous field of light.
Walking around the exhibition is also art in itself. Sugimoto designed the exhibition himself as a mandala – a circular, cosmological diagram. So, instead of marching through it, you drift. Paths split, loop, reconnect. There’s no prescribed route, no “correct” way to see it. The mandala structure also quietly mirrors the Buddhist concept of the Five Elements – Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void – with five interlinked sections that flow into one another.
Admission ranges from $20 (standard adults), $15 (standard concessions and local adults), and $10 (local senior concessions and NSFs), inclusive of booking fees, while children aged 6 and below enter free.
Find out more and get your tickets here.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Form Is Emptiness runs from May 29, 2026 to October 4, 2026 at SAM – Tanjong Pagar Distripark’s Gallery 1 and The Engine Room, open from 10am to 7pm daily.
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