Hiroshi Sugimoto
Form Is Emptiness
Singapore Art Museum

At the heart of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Form Is Emptiness” at the Singapore Art Museum stands Mathematical Model 002: Dini’s Surface (2005), a gleaming aluminum and steel sculpture spiraling upward like an axis mundi. Encircling it, monochrome photographs of a thousand Kannon bodhisattvas from Sea of Buddha (1995) shimmer in repetition across the curved walls. Together, they anchor the exhibition’s mandala-like layout—designed by Sugimoto himself, with openings cut along an east-west meridian—drawing different series into dialogue.

Though best known for his photography, Sugimoto’s polymathic practice encompasses sculpture, installation, architecture, and, more recently, calligraphy. Bringing together five decades of work, his first major Southeast Asian survey examines how images shape and destabilize our understanding of time, perception, and the real. Its title, drawn from the Heart Sutra’s most venerated line—“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form”—resonates through works that continually blur the boundaries between permanence and flux, appearance and illusion.